The Trashman

by William Alan Webb

  “I’ve always thought of them as timelines,” Dad said.

  “We call them variations,” Cynthia said. “As in, variations on reality.”

  “And there are millions of them where they could be holding Dawn?” I said.

  “Billions, if not trillions,” Jürgen said. “No one knows for certain.”

  I snapped my fingers. “The Ropoco, he travels from one to another looking for food, right?”

  Jürgen continued, “It’s more a ‘they’ than a ‘he,’ but yes, Ropocos like Earth food and have learned the way here, although the one you met seems to have been put on your trail deliberately. Knemon, whom you met, has the job of keeping it all from collapsing.”

  “The Space-Time Continuum.”

  “Yes.”

  “Could we hire a Ropoco to show us the way? Or maybe that other thing…a Pin-something?”

  With a stony expression I didn’t recognize, Cynthia shook her head. “Pincara. We have tried in the past. It did not work out.”

  “Then what? How do we find her?”

  She answered me but met my father’s eyes.

  “Nathan officially joins LEI, after which I approve an emergency Second Class License so he may also join Special Activities Division.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Dad said.

  “Because otherwise you cannot discover the Balance.”

  “I don’t follow,” Dad said.

  I was glad one of us said it, because I wasn’t following her either. Cynthia rose and walked slowly around the room. Most of the time I would have enjoyed watching her slightly one-sided gait but thinking about losing One Shot spiked the rage I’d acquired over most of the past twenty years. I felt the need to strike out, to do what I did best—to kill people. In this case, bad people. Killing for money is mercenary. To live with yourself you have to dampen your emotions to whatever extent possible. Killing for revenge, however, satisfied whatever part of me comprised my soul at a deep and personal level.

  “You have the ability to transit into variations,” she said, “the same as Ropocos do. You also have an ability that is unique in our experience, to change into a canine. Neither of these talents has ever been tested or explored, so there is conjecture that if you discover the Balance—”

  “You want him to become some kind of interdimensional bloodhound,” I said with a snap of my fingers.

  Cynthia nodded. “I would have said Belgian Malinois, but yes, that’s it precisely.”

  Chapter 25

  I sat and smoked and brooded in a recliner. I could feel sleep clawing at the back of my brain, the state where your eyes want to close but you’re too keyed up to rest. Merkus emptied the ashtray twice, and lowered the lights without my asking, which was a good idea that didn’t work.

  “Your father is a tough man, Steed,” Cynthia said. I hadn’t seen her sit down on the couch, and her sympathetic tone amped my worry level into trip-hammer-heartrate range.

  “Yeah, he’s tough, but so am I and it almost killed me. He’s twenty years older, Cynthia. Sending him into that torture chamber was irresponsible in the first degree. Hell, he’s old enough now that McDonald’s gives him a senior citizen discount. He has no business undergoing such an ordeal.”

  “Nobody forced him.”

  “I know, but nobody twisted your arm to let him, either.”

  “Nathan was going after Dona S. no matter what anybody said. This at least might give him some chance to survive.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Then why do you seem angry with me?”

  “Because he’s not here for me to yell at!”

  “Oh, so now I’m a surrogate for your papa?”

  I had to chuckle at that. “One thing you’ll never be is a surrogate, particularly for a man.”

  “Have you fully processed that he’s alive yet? Is that part of the problem?”

  This was the Cynthia Witherbot that I both loved and hated. When she wasn’t being the British Bitch, which she was long before she got tangled up with LEI, she could be warm, empathetic and endearing in a way that made me want to hold her and never let go. I had loved every atom of her with a passion that lingered until that moment, although I resisted admitting it to myself. Sentiments were a luxury professional killers could ill afford.

  “No, I have probably not processed it, and yes, that’s likely part of the problem. We’ve all seen videos of the aftermath, of the Capitol Building blazing from end to end. There was never any doubt that he’d died. Nobody in that room was ever identified, not one person. The fire was so hot that even teeth turned to ash, so how could my father have lived through it? I didn’t even know magic existed until—How long have I been anyway?”

  “About a month.”

  “So, Dawn has been held prisoner for a month?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn. Poor kid.”

  Cynthia ran a finger across her lips and then sipped a cup of herbal tea. She was biting back a comment, and I recognized it because it was so unlike her. One thing Cynthia Witherbot had never been known for was her tact.

  “Okay, so talk,” I said. “What aren’t you saying? No bullshit; just tell me.”

  She still hesitated. “Do you really like this girl, or is she just another piece?”

  “That depends on who’s asking. Is this the Assistant Director of LEI, or the woman I would once have died for?”

  “Once?” She cocked her head. Damn her. Cynthia knew exactly how to make my glands release floods of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin into my veins. I damn near proposed on the spot…again. But it did have the desired effect of making me want to answer her question honestly.

  I looked away as I whispered the answer. “You broke my heart, Cyn. I hated you so much, and for so long…”

  Her hand touched my forearm. Stop, stop, stop!

  “That was past tense.”

  “I still hate you,” I said, turning to meet her gaze. “I hate you because I love you more than life itself and you know that. And you have consistently used that to manipulate me. What’s more, you love me, too. There’s no doubt about that in mind, so if it’s not true tell me now, right this second.”

  “Steed—”

  “Now.”

  “Can’t I just be a friend?”

  “No. I have never thought of Cynthia Witherbot being my friend. The hottest woman I’ve ever known, yes. The bitchiest woman I’ve known, sure. But my friend? No, that doesn’t fly. However, your refusal to give me a straight answer is all the answer I need.”

  “Steed, please—”

  I held up my hand, palm outward. “No, forget it. Nothing has changed in twenty years and nothing is going to change. Thank you for not leading me on.”

  The change in her features might have gone unnoticed by anyone else, only I knew Cynthia too well to miss it. Gone was the human being; the Bitch was back.

  “Are you avoiding the question about your feelings for Miss Delvin?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  That caught her off guard, and she did something that caused Merkus, who was bringing a pot of fresh tea, to straighten in alarm: she giggled. I understood his reaction. It didn’t last long and was only the third or fourth time I’d ever seen her laugh, but it definitely happened. I suspected the entire company would know within hours.

  Then came the grim, scary face of someone who knows they have a lot of power and aren’t afraid to use it. Sadly, her scowl brought out deep lines in her face I’d never seen before and caused her cheeks to droop ever so slightly.

  “I understand if you lust after her, Steed, she’s a most desirable young woman, but my God, she’s younger than your dau—”

  Yet again Cynthia reacted in a way I’d never seen before, and it was a reaction I didn’t understand. She stopped, cast her eyes down, and glanced to the side. I waited for her to finish. A pulse of aura enveloped her, a strange pink shade of red I’d never seen. Auras are something that happen by reflex; I rarely have to concent
rate to make them appear, and I don’t see auras on people I know very well, I think because my mind knows it’s unnecessary. Cynthia has long been one of the latter type…until now. I had no idea what was going on.

  “Well?” I finally prompted.

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to finish what you were saying? Something about a daa? My Dad, maybe?”

  “I did finish.” The lie was obvious on her face, even without my suspicions about the new power I was manifesting. Her reaction surpassed surprising me and led me into the realm of worry. One thing the British Bitch did very well was lie. The whole conversation had turned weird.

  “I think not,” I said, “you started to say something about my daa, but stopped.”

  “You need to have your hearing test, Steed. I said ‘dog,’ not ‘daa.’”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She shrugged.

  “Whatever you feel for Miss Delvin, I think you need to be prepared in case she doesn’t want to be rescued. Dona Salvatorelli has been at this since before Columbus’s great-grandfather was born. We do not yet understand how she manipulates kaval to live so long, but we do know she is one of the most powerful gatandis on Earth, and she commands an organization whose scope we are only now beginning to glimpse. Miss Delvin may find the mentoring that Dona S. can dangle as a carrot most appealing. Your father did.”

  “Since you put it that way, maybe I was being hasty when I turned her down.”

  “Her?”

  “Dona S.”

  “Of course, maybe you were.”

  “I hope you know better, Cynthia. I lost a lot of friends because of Dona S., including a man I deeply respected, Sergeant Major Dedrick Tolliver.”

  “One Shot.”

  “And Carlos, too. He was a musclehead, but he died fighting beside me. I don’t forget things like that.”

  “You are such a dinosaur, Steed. You could be Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.”

  “They weren’t real.”

  “If they were.”

  “They weren’t hitmen.”

  “Assassination is merely another form of art.”

  “I don’t know about that. What I do know is that I have a contract to kill Dona S., and I mean to carry it out.”

  “You have been misinformed. There is no contract, not in a formal sense. You are not obligated to participate in the effort to rescue Miss Delvin.”

  “It’s you who’ve been misinformed,” I said. “There is a contract, signed and everything. I’m my own client.”

  “I’m not sure you’re allowed to do that.”

  “I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission.”

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  “And Miss Delvin? What if she stands against you?”

  “You know the rules. Anyone who tries to prevent a licensed Shooter from fulfilling their contract becomes a legal target. Whatever I might feel for Dawn personally, if she tries to stop me from killing Salvatorelli she’ll become collateral damage.”

  “That assumes your contract is legal. But let me put your mind at rest where Miss Delvin is concerned. If she refused our outreach, her contract is automatically reinstated, and you are required to fulfill it.”

  Six hours later my father came through the door. When he left, he looked younger than his 59 years. Now he might have been 80, and not a soft 80, like a politician, but a hard-lived 80 like a farmer. Deep lines and a gray pallor reflected what must have been torture.

  “Congrats, Dad,” I said, patting his shoulder. “You look good.”

  Dad wobbled. Günther came up and took his left elbow while I took his right. I could barely hear Dad’s voice.

  “You used to be a much better liar.”

  We helped him into a bedroom and left him sitting on the edge of the bed. Seconds after I closed the door, he called me back in. I froze in the doorway at the sight of a massive, hairy creature sinking deep into the mattress. The long snout full of teeth seemed less dangerous than the curved claws on its hands and feet, or more accurately, its paws. It spoke clearly enough, with a low growl underlining the words.

  “Maybe you were right about that werewolf thing.”

  Chapter 26

  For the next two weeks I was at the center of a tornado of organizational frenzy. It turned out that Special Activities Division had a lot more muscle than I thought, and by muscle I meant guns and launchers of things that exploded, and people who knew how to use them. Who and what they were and where they came from I didn’t know and didn’t ask. In the end, who cares about the race of the guy next to you in the foxhole?

  I was too busy working out, fighting off nicotine cravings as I stopped smoking again, meditating to let my newly reformatted brain organize itself to improve my reaction times and better understand my powers, practicing various methods of actively using kaval, reading up on techniques, studying videos of Dona Salvatorelli and trying to get to know Venus in the Biblical sense. Dad was nowhere to be found, and when I asked Cynthia about it before she returned to LEI Corporate Headquarters in Dallas, she told me he was training with Mister Keel. As it turned out, the dead guy was a master gatandi, too.

  “How come I didn’t get personal training?” I said.

  “I can arrange it, if that’s what you want,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Now that I think about it, I’ll pass.”

  With no one around to see, Cynthia touched my cheek.

  “Poor Steed, always wants what’s bad for him.”

  I awoke on the morning of our final briefing wearing a cloak of foreboding. Most people who feel that way push through and think it’s their imagination, but not me. I knew better, and I listened. Something wicked our way came. I told Cynthia, but without a specific threat there was no way to prepare.

  The assembly took place in a chamber I remembered from Ribaldo’s lecture after I had discovered the Balance. A hundred or more people sat in folding chairs facing a raised dais, although “people” might be stretching the point. Merkus stood on the platform up front wearing the LEI standard four-color camo, as did Ribaldo and Jürgen. The twins wearing something other than pristine suits seemed odd at first, yet both looked quite natural in full battle rattle. In passing, I noticed that Venus did, too. Usually I would have been disappointed no matter what she wore, except that morning I was too distracted to care. Cynthia stood behind the podium and waved me forward. I caught her eye and motioned to the side. Scowling, she joined me.

  I pointed to her headset microphone. “Is that thing off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s my father?”

  “He is at ground level. As I understand it his lessons have not yet been completed.”

  My sense of impending danger increased by the second, and I told her so.

  “And you still have no sense of the nature of this threat?” she said, not questioning the validity of the warning.

  “None.”

  The entire audience watched our exchange. They couldn’t hear us, but they didn’t need to. Veteran soldiers and/or mercs didn’t need a teleprompter to know the score. No matter how well controlled the faces of their commanders, they invariably knew the score.

  Among three score humans sat a dozen of Merkus’ people, although Andrew wasn’t among them. He’d never impressed me as the fighting type anyway. Others had skeletal bodies topped by elongated heads pointed at the crown and chin and flat noses with three nostrils that were little more than slits. At least two could have been Bigfoots, although no taller than a man. Everyone had geared up before coming, and the variety of weapons exceeded anything in my experience.

  The twins noticed the urgency of Cynthia’s and my whispered conversation and joined us. She caught them up on my danger warning.

  “We are five stories deep in a hardened bunker complex,” she said. “Nothing less than a medium-yield nuclear device will penetrate here.”

  “The Air Force has some pretty powerful bunker busters,” I said. “Mayb
e Dona S. got her hands on some of those.”

  Cynthia shook her head hard enough to dislodge several strands of hair from under her headphone strap.

  “No less than four would be needed to destroy more than the highest level, the one under the airstrip. Don’t ask how I know that, merely accept it as fact.”

  “What about nukes then? Could Dona S. get her hands on one?”

  “I don’t see how. Not big enough to hurt us here. And launching a nuclear weapon into the United States would invite retribution on a scale that not even the Red Nail could withstand. Nor is there reason to, SAD is only one of her enemies…the most dangerous, maybe, but still only one among many. A better question would be, if we are about to be attacked by the Red Nail, how do they know where we are? This facility is known to very few and is protected by powerful spells. Dona Salvatorelli is immensely powerful, but she is not omniscient.”

  I hadn’t survived so long in a dangerous profession by being careless, so while I felt shame at doing so, I concentrated on visualizing Cynthia’s aura. I had figured out that the pinkish-red color I’d first noticed two weeks ago was a variation on my power to tell friend from foe and showed me when someone lied. Now it was green. She was telling me the truth. As I stared at her my mind raced through possibilities. What was coming?

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

  That snapped me out of my reverie.

  “We’ve got a mole,” I declared, in a tone that left no room for argument.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “There’s no time to explain, just go with me on this. I want you to go the podium and say these exact words: Someone in here has betrayed us. Then point to each person, one at a time, and ask if they are the traitor. Have you got that? Each person and spend about five seconds on each one.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Trust me for once in your life.”

  Wearing her patented scowl of disapproval, Cynthia did as I asked. I then told the twins to flank the crowd and post Merkus at the back to stop anyone from leaving, and to have their weapons at the ready.

  I stationed myself on Cynthia’s right side and crossed my arms so the tricked-out P320 was near my right hand. SAD’s after-action team had rescued it from the beach and cleaned it for me. Unfortunately, I’d fired off all the EXACTO rounds, and DARPA wasn’t exactly thrilled with my request for more. So, if my gambit went down as I figured it would, I’d have to use all of my kaval-directed proficiency not to hit the wrong target.