Lethal Cargo

by Felix R. Savage

  Everyone else hastily stood, including me and Irene. I knew when to get out while the getting was good, but an impulse—recklessness, defiance, or mere civility—made me stick out my hand to the chief prosecutor. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

  A twinge of disgust passed over her face. She let my hand hang in the air. I suppose it could have been because I had just spent several hours in a none-too-fragrant jail cell. My face reddening, I shoved my hands in my pockets. Uncouth attitude: check. Chip on shoulder: check.

  “Collect your bot on the way out,” the chief prosecutor said as she left the room. “It’s either that, or I hire it.”

  When Irene and I swung by the front desk, where MF was waiting, we overheard Parsec’s voice coming from one of the interview rooms beyond the reception area. He must have been shouting at the top of his lungs. “I did not know anything!”

  I looked down at my shoes. They were dirty, and I hadn’t been given the laces back.

  *

  I called my truck. While we were waiting for it, a block from the police station, I said to Irene, “So where did that thing really come from?”

  She let out one of her cat-like hisses. “You’re not as dumb as you look, are you, Mike?”

  “Neither is Parsec. No way he had that thing on display in his office.”

  Irene looked left and right along the street for the truck. MF was standing at the curb a few meters from us. Irene lowered her voice. “Do you think they believed me?”

  “We’re out here, and he’s in there.”

  “True.”

  “The art of the sale,” I said, “is that you can sell anything to someone who wants to buy. They’ve been wanting to put Parsec away for years. You did them—and Ponce de Leon—a big favor.”

  She relaxed a tad. “That’s how I see it.”

  My truck pulled up at the curb. MF got in the back. Irene and I got in the cab. “Home,” I said. As the truck started moving, I turned to Irene. “So where did it come from?” I asked again.

  She had her sneakers up on the dashboard. One forearm gracefully drooped over her eyes. “How well do you know Evan Zhang?”

  “Not very.”

  “He’s a crook. His bread and butter is runs to the Hurtworlds. That should tell you something.”

  “He was the one who brought the thing back.”

  “Yeah. I went to see him in case he had any information. He had Mr. Brains on his desk. Minute I saw it, I knew that’s what I was looking for. He told me what I told them: Mujin Inc gave it back to him to dispose of, and he, being a sick fucker, turned it into a desk ornament.”

  “And then he gave it to you?”

  “Better believe he wanted rid of it after what happened today.”

  “I can see that.”

  “So I took it to Parsec’s office, set it up next to his award plaques, took some pictures. And waited for him to get there.”

  I let out a long breath. Irene—and I, by implication—had framed Parsec. He would be going down for something he hadn’t done. “What if Zhang talks to the police?”

  Irene raised her arm an inch and glared at me beneath it. “He won’t talk to the police,” she said, “because he’s going to have an accident.”

  “Going to?”

  “I didn’t have time today. I figure we can go over there tomorrow or the next day. Better not leave it too long, though.”

  “Yeah,” I echoed, “better not leave it too long.”

  The truck glided through the darkened streets. I rested my hands on the wheel, feeling it move gently as the AI steered. The night breeze blew in through my open window, carrying the good, homey smells of Shiftertown: gravelnuts, barbecue, the sea.

  “Hey, Irene?” I said. “Thank you.”

  “You owe me big-time.”

  “I know.”

  “Shit, Mike, I was so scared going into that place, I thought I was going to pass out at the front desk.” Irene stretched her arms out in front of her and flexed them in a feline stretch. “It was something I had to face and conquer.”

  “Why …”

  I had meant to ask why she was so scared. I wanted to know what the chief prosecutor had been alluding to. But she said with sudden intensity, “Because you’re the best boss I ever had. Well, you’re the only boss I ever had, apart from the army. But I mean it. You give a damn. You actually care about people. It was a revelation to me, and I know Rex feels the same way. That’s why he was OK with me doing this. We agreed, we are not going to let Mike take the fall for the whole thing on some BS smuggling charge.”

  I swallowed. I felt like I might blubber. I managed to produce a light tone. “You are the best hire I ever made. Thank God I was able to look past the sexy, intriguing exterior to the inner deviousness.”

  Irene laughed one of her rare loud laughs, almost a giggle. “Home,” she said, in the tone you would use to say “Victory!” She sat up straight as the truck pulled up in front of our building. There was one light on upstairs. My apartment was dark and desolate. Irene popped her door. “What, are you going on somewhere?” she said, when I didn’t move.

  “Going to pick up Lucy,” I said. “Mind if I let MF out here? He can hang out downstairs.”

  She shrugged. She still hadn’t forgiven MF for letching on her. “Give Lucy a big kiss from me and tell her we’re going to be home tomorrow morning, if she wants to play. Mia’s really missed her.”

  I watched Irene and MF climb the steps.

  Then I turned the truck around and headed back to the police station.

  57

  “I need to speak to Jose-Maria d’Alencon.”

  The duty office scowled at me. “Weren’t you just here?”

  “Yup,” I said, “and now I’m back.”

  I waited. I couldn’t hear Parsec yelling anymore. Maybe he was finally too worn out to keep protesting his innocence.

  D’Alencon came down to the front desk in shirtsleeves. His springy gait faltered when he saw me. “Something wrong, Tiger?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I forgot to pick up my stuff.” He frowned. “When y’all arrested me, you confiscated some stuff of mine that was in Parsec’s car. A bag. My daughter’s sewing project was in there. You haven’t gone and trashed it, have you?”

  “No,” d’Alencon said slowly. “That’ll be in the evidence room.” He held my eyes for a moment, and then crooked a finger for me to come with him.

  We went back behind the desk, past the interrogation rooms, through an open-plan office where half a hundred officers were answering phones. I followed d’Alencon down a flight of stairs so long, we seemed to be descending into a basement level carved out of Ponce de Leon’s very bedrock.

  “Even the evidence officer’s been reassigned to answerin’ phones,” d’Alencon said dryly as he unlocked a steel door. “Tell ya, I’ve been in the force twenty years, and this is the closest call we ever had.”

  Inside, sensor-activated lights came on, revealing aisles of shelves groaning with evidence boxes, stretching away into the dark. Our footsteps echoed. The lights followed us, and switched themselves off behind us, so that we moved in a puddle of light with shadows pressing in before and behind. D’Alencon stopped in front of a shelf less dusty than the rest. “This is your stuff.”

  It was cool down here, and yet sweat matted my t-shirt to my back. I said, “This was somewhat of a pretext, Bones. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Oh, look,” d’Alencon said. “There’s something wrong with that light. Gimme a boost.”

  I cupped my hands on a braced knee, and d’Alencon’s size sixteen landed in them. He reached up to the light, unscrewed it, and did something to the wiring inside the cover. It went out.

  D’Alencon stumbled down to the floor in pitch darkness, lost his balance, and crashed into the shelves. The noise echoed through the room. “Shit,” he said.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah. Shame about that light malfunctioning. The same sensors control the audio monitoring equipme
nt. You were saying?”

  It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I was grateful for it. I sat down on the concrete floor and leaned against evidence boxes, inhaling the dust of old crimes. “Have a seat, Bones. This could take a little while.”

  His gunbelt creaked and he groaned quietly as he sat down. His foot brushed my leg. He was sitting beside me, like a friend, not across from me, like an interrogator. He wouldn’t feel so friendly in a minute. “Go on.”

  “When I was twenty-two,” I said, “I left the army. I didn’t really want to leave, but the war was over, and they were letting people go. So I took my exit pay and I borrowed some money and I started a shipping company with two friends, Dolph and another guy, Art Koolhaus. You might remember him. We called him McKool.”

  “Shit, yeah. What ever happened to him?”

  “Dead.”

  “Man.”

  “In those days, we were a tramp outfit. We had no home base. We lived from hand to mouth, cargo to cargo. My idea was I wanted to add value to the Cluster, to make up for everything we did in the war. But I had a mortgage on my ship, and when other opportunities came along, I didn’t say no.”

  “What kind of other opportunities?”

  “The first contract we took was on a Techworld. The customer wanted a business rival killed on a hunting trip. Make it look like animals …

  “One time in the Hurtworlds, we robbed a currency mine. We ended up giving it back, but only because we got caught …

  “I lost my first ship in the Hurtworlds, too. We’d been hired to hijack an antimatter tanker. You know how they always put the AM depots on the far side of a moon. So we put our ship on autopilot and crashed it into the other side of the moon to create a distraction. But we got away with enough antimatter to buy a better one …”

  I went on, telling him every dirty job I’d ever done, as far as I could remember. The gist was that I wasn’t much better than the Travellers, except I didn’t buy into anyone’s stinking ideology, and for what it’s worth, I tried not to hurt the innocent. My voice grew hoarse. I rambled.

  “I was married by that time. Sophia loved the dirty jobs. She pulled the trigger herself on the vice president of the Zygrint, you know, those humanoid guys who make the living monuments …”

  “I remember hearing about that. That was y’all?”

  “Yeah. That was a higher profile job than I really care for. Tell ya the truth, I was relieved when Sophia got pregnant and had to quit flying. But she—she was furious about it. I promised her anything she wanted if we could only keep the baby. She agreed, but looking back, that was the end of our marriage …

  “After Lucy was born, I started to dial it back. You get a whole different perspective on life when that little person is looking up at you, trusting you to be … to be—” I suddenly choked up. All this time I had been trying not to think about Lucy. Trying not to think about how she’d react when her daddy didn’t come home. Now I started crying. My sobs sounded awful, gulping and raw, like wild animal noises. Thank God it was dark in here.

  “Want a tissue?” d’Alencon said.

  Hunched over my knees, wiping my face with my hands, I remembered what Irene had done for me. What Dolph had done for me. What Martin had done for me. I’d been stupid. I had meant to leverage my confession into immunity for them, but I’d plain forgotten to set conditions. I’d just let it all spill out. “No,” I gasped, “I’m good.”

  “Good, ‘cause I don’t have any tissues, anyway.”

  “Bones—a favor … My crew—don’t prosecute them. Please.” All I could do at this point was beg.

  D’Alencon shifted uneasily. “Tiger …”

  “What?”

  “There ain’t … shit, I hate to ask … there ain’t anything wrong with that evidence, is there?”

  I froze. Some part of d’Alencon suspected that Mr. Brains was too good to be true. And now his career hung on it. He’d stuck his neck out, gotten the chief prosecutor to sign off on it.

  “Course there’s nothing wrong with it,” I said, with all the conviction I could muster. “It’s cast-iron proof that Parsec is an idiot.” I’d have to get onto Evan Zhang before the police could. Except I wouldn’t be able to, because I’d be in jail. Well, Irene would.

  D’Alencon chuckled, sounding relieved and a bit embarrassed. “It’s just, I got a sense that Ms. Seagrave may not have rung the doorbell, if you know what I mean.”

  I smiled in the darkness. “Well, I don’t see that that really matters.”

  “True enough. I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes you gotta do wrong to do good.”

  “I guess maybe,” I said. “But that wasn’t true in my case. I did wrong for money.”

  “That’s what I’m curious about, Tiger.” D’Alencon’s voice shifted into a more somber register. “What did you do with it all?”

  “Huh?”

  “All the money you made. I assume these jobs were well paid. So where is it? Your bank account is so empty there’s an echo in there. You got a gambling problem? Someone blackmailing you?”

  “No, and no. I … well, I don’t know, Bones. I spend it. I bought a nanny bot; that cost a chunk of change. But mostly it goes on payroll, repairs, rent, the usual.”

  “What about all those cargoes you carry?”

  “Shit, Bones, you can’t keep a ship like the St. Clare flying on shipping fees. Everyone in the business knows that.”

  “So in a way, you been taking contracts just to keep flying.”

  “I … yeah, I guess so.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Spent it all,” d’Alencon murmured under his breath. “Spent it on the usual. Shifters.”

  I cringed. “Can I smoke?”

  “No, you cannot smoke in here.” I heard rustling as d’Alencon heaved himself to his feet. I scrambled upright, too.

  Without warning, he bodyslammed me into the shelves, gripping the front of my t-shirt with one hand. Evidence boxes thumped to the floor on the other side of the open shelves. I struggled instinctively, and then went limp as his gun dug into the side of my stomach.

  58

  D’Alencon pressed me against the shelves, his whole weight on my chest, his gun digging into my abdomen. “How much of what you just told me was bullshit, Tiger?” he said, low.

  “None of it.”

  He breathed heavily into my face. I smelled onions, sour coffee. Then he let go of me and stepped back. I couldn’t see his gun, didn’t dare to move. A light came on in the darkness: the screen of Bones’s phone. It lit his pudgy face from below, ghoulishly.

  “I’m saving this audio file in my personal cloud,” he said. “To remind me of why I do this job.”

  “I … I don’t …”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you going to … arrest me?”

  “No.”

  “But …”

  “Shit, Mike, what do you want me to say? Thank you for your service?”

  “You don’t gotta be like that, Bones.”

  “And also, hire a damn accountant.”

  He walked away. I chased after him. The ceiling lights came on. We blinked at each other, squinting. “Is that it?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” D’Alencon looked up at the lights, reminding me that the audio monitoring equipment was back on again.

  “Ah,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “You forgot your stuff.”

  “Right.” My head was spinning.

  We walked back into the shadows, and d’Alencon took a box with my name on it down from the shelf. He held up his phone to vid me opening the evidence seals. “Everything in there?”

  I lifted out the tote bag that Cecilia Parsec had given Lucy. “Yup.”

  We trudged back to the exit. As we climbed the long flight of stairs, the steamy warmth of a Mag-Ingat night closed around us again, welcome as an embrace after the cool of that dungeon.

  D’Alencon escorted me out to the street.
“Give my regards to your daughter,” he said. “I’ve got three boys of my own.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, idiotically. “That’s great.”

  The uptown spires scintillated in the night. Black patches spoiled the display of lights, where the controlling AIs had not yet been rebooted. My truck arrived.

  I unlocked my fingers from the tote bag. “I … I think you need to see this. It was given to me by the Parsecs. They got it from my ex-wife. She parked it with them, and apparently did not have time to go back for it before she fled the planet.”

  D’Alencon glanced inside. His eyes widened. “Well, well.”

  I shrugged. “You asked me to let you know if I saw anything unusual. Do you want to keep it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, if you don’t mind, I think I will.” He smiled, grimly. “A little bit of extra insurance for our case against Parsec.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “It’s a minimum sentence of six years for conspiring with Travellers. Did you know that?”

  “Hang on,” I said. “I have to get my daughter’s stuff out.”

  I reached into the bag and took out Lucy’s sewing project, feeling, with a twinge of disgust, past the greasy leather of Sophia’s Traveller coat.

  “I’ll be in touch,” d’Alencon said. “Take care, Mike.”

  “You, too.”

  I climbed in my truck and drove off. It took several blocks for it to sink in that I was free. When it did, a sensation of lightness and relief filled my body, like a sort of mental Shift—a spiritual reset. My aches and pains and weariness faded away. I put on some music and sang along as I cruised downtown to Christy’s place.

  *

  Christy buzzed me into the building and greeted me at the front door of her apartment. “Sssh. She’s asleep.”

  Over Christy’s shoulder, I could see the whole of the tiny apartment. The waterfall curtain had been rolled up to the ceiling. One of the pink-tinted Christmas lights glowed, wreathed in the leaves of a pot plant, like a nightlight. In Christy’s bed lay my daughter. She was sleeping face down with one arm hanging off the side of the bed, only the tip of her nose sticking out beneath the oak-brown tangle of her hair. Christy herself must have been sleeping on the duvet that took up most of the floor—I could see the dent left in it by her body.