Accelerated (8 page)

“Spare me the details how,” I said. “What did you find?”

He sipped more orange juice and rubbed his eyes harder than seemed wise. “It’s still too early to talk about this,” he complained. He yawned, finished the juice and pitched the plastic bottle into the trash bag. Turning to me, he said, “Polarity Magnetics is a subsidiary of a major military contractor, one that supplies combat jet parts.”

“Boeing?” I asked.

“No. The third company that seldom gets air time,” Blake said. “They’ve been moving into new technologies.”

“Combat hardware?” I asked.

“Space.”

“I thought there were treaties against the militarization of space.”

“Let me clue you in,” Blake said. “There have been treaties trying to halt war and slow down the spread of advanced weaponry since…since the Crusades, at least.”

Blake was something of a history buff. No, he was a reader with wide tastes, historical facts among them.

“Back in 1139,” he said, “the Pope issued an edict prohibiting crossbows. No one was supposed to fire them against fellow Christians, and most certainly one wasn’t supposed to use them against Christian knights. Naturally, there was no law against using them against Muslims and pagans.”

“What does that have to do with—”

“Crossbows were that age’s high-tech weapon,” Blake said, talking over me. “Any peasant could wind up a crossbow and put a dart in it, aim and fire at a noble knight. The arrow or bolt punched through the expensive armor and killed the warrior. That was bad because training a knight took a lifetime, and that armor, horse and sword, the cost was prohibitive. Peasants with cheap crossbows changed the rules no matter what the laws said. Now do you think a piece of paper has stopped the great powers or enterprising companies from militarizing space?”

“What else did you discover?”

Blake pulled a granola bar out of his pocket, ripped it open with his teeth and began to speak with a mouthful of chewy crumbs.

“I remembered a name you once told me, another of the accelerated, a Doctor Cheng. Her name showed up last night. Tina Cheng is the acting president of Polarity Magnetics, Long Beach Department. She has a nice picture on the web site and a pretty smile.”

I’d known that Doctor Cheng worked for Polarity Magnetics, since Kay had told me. I hadn’t known she ran the division in Long Beach. Kay and Tina Cheng had never gotten along well in Geneva. If Cheng ran Polarity, it meant Kay had stolen from her and tried to force Doctor Cheng’s hand. I grimaced. Tina Cheng would not have liked that at all. She would have been furious, if she was anything like the woman she used to be before the accident.

“Good work,” I said.

“It was just a matter of a few clicks.”

“Probably more than a few,” I said.

Blake shrugged.

Tina Cheng…I tried to remember what I knew about her, and I wondered how the acceleration had changed her.

-8-

We docked in the Long Beach Marina without incident. I gave Blake cash and he paid with a credit card, renting two Fords. Mine stank of cigarettes. Blake had printed copies of several Long Beach locations, particularly Center Street, the movie theater Kay had walked out of, the right police station and the local morgue.

I sent Blake to the police. The less I had to do with them the better. It wasn’t out of any inherent dislike of the police. They were the thin blue line, these days more than ever. My problem was that they were trained observers. They noticed my strangeness more than others did, and then they began probing. My evasiveness made them suspicious—it had happened to me enough that it had become a pattern. Soon, they stopped answering my questions. Blake, on the other hand, was good at getting cops to talk. I wanted to learn the known facts of the case.

I’d been thinking about Kay, about the last time we talked. She had said something that I only really recalled now. It had been as she’d rubbed her wrist aboard the
Alamo
.

She had tested her left wrist, the one I’d grabbed and used to yank her into the cabin. She had said, “You nearly tore my arm out.” These days, I was used to comments like that. Then she had added, “You shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

That was an odd comment for her. Kay had never been strong. I don’t ever recall her using the gym. She liked walking and swimming as exercise, but never lifting weights. She knew my difference, how I’d changed. She knew I could accidently hurt people, hurt them badly.

Maybe if it had just been the odd comment, I wouldn’t have remembered. But there had also been her odd behavior on the concrete stairs. How had she managed to keep her balance with a junkie yanking on her purse? And how had she managed to slam him so hard? If I were to guess, Kay had been stronger than she should have been, and she’d shown amazing balance.

I doubted anyone had duplicated the Geneva accident. I’d been led to believe someone would need to use the Hadron Collider or something equally powerful to do that. Besides, many people had died that day. Those of us who had been exposed and survived, we’d each had different reactions, or gained different abilities. I don’t know that being denser was an ability exactly, or randomly phasing in and out, but what else could people call it? Ability was good enough as a description. No. If I was right, Kay had become stronger some other way. It was only a theory, however, a rather thinly evidenced one. I wanted to test it before I said anything aloud, and the only way I could test it now was to examine Kay’s corpse.

The newspaper article hadn’t said anything about a funeral, nor had Blake discovered further information about her on the net. The average time hospital morgues kept a dead body was about four days. I needed to get there sooner rather than later.

It was still early, well before morning rush hour. I used my cell, thumbed in the hospital’s address, read the directions and started down Florence Boulevard.

I didn’t like the idea of looking at Kay’s corpse. Frankly, I didn’t want to walk into a morgue if I didn’t have to. Except for the battlefield or for those I’d slain, I actively disliked seeing a dead body. The idea of storing the dead…I liked that even less. Maybe that’s why Blake’s stories about the dead had stuck with me like a bad credit rating.

Blake had once told me about cadaver thieves. Pharmaceutical companies needed the body parts of the dead, while other medical procedures used critical organs. Some Third World countries forcibly harvested kidneys from criminals and sold them to rich Westerners needing organ transplants. Some American criminals fronted as a university’s medical center, collected the dead and resold them to the pharmaceutical companies. Blake had informed me that a corpse fetched two hundred thousand dollars on the black market.

I wondered how much my body would cash out at, whether my differences would make it more or less valuable.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. Morgues were easy to find. They were almost universally in the basement or the ground floor and near the receiving area, which usually put them near the hospital’s cafeteria.

It was already warm outside as I locked the car. As I walked toward the entrance, I realized that I needed a plan, a way inside. Likely, the morgue would be empty. Probably, it would have a locked and coded door. Forcing it would give me entry but that would also sound an alarm. If this door was in the basement, I need merely blanket a few lights. That would give me shadows, my element.

Luck ran against me, however. As I approached the entrance, I heard laughter through the glass. It wasn’t the quiet kind, but loud and raucous, the opposite of what one would expect at a morgue.

Because of the angle of the sun, I had to use my hands, shielding the corners of my eyes as I pressed my face against the glass. A large woman in an orderly’s gown stood just inside the hall. She had long, blond hair, obviously dyed as she had dark eyebrows. She also had caps on her teeth, at least those I could see. She laughed with her mouth open so I saw most of them. A nametag said she was Alice Smith and by her skin, I guessed her to be in her forties. She spoke into a cell phone. No, she brayed laughter into one.

Alice Smith stiffened at the sight of me peering through the glass door, and her eyebrows shot up. Even though it was through the glass, I heard her say, “I’ll have to call you back.” She had a loud voice. Then she snapped the cell phone shut and dropped it into a pocket in her gown.

“Yes?” she said through the glass, all laughter disappearing from her voice.

I bobbed my head, trying to appear apologetic. I’d have to bluff my way in. “Umm, I’m not sure if this is the right place.”

“Who are you looking for?” she asked gruffly.

“Ah…” I glanced right and left, deciding to try to balls it through. “Is this where they keep…the, ah, the
bodies
?”

“This is the morgue, yes. Now what do you want? I’m busy.”

“I’m here to identify the body.”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that.”

“Jane Doe,” I said. Long Beach was part of Greater Los Angeles, and there were more murders these days than ever. Some of the murderers left nameless bodies. The nameless men they called “John Doe” and the woman they named “Jane Doe.” Sometimes, in hard-to-solve cases, the police showed photos or drawings of the deceased on line, hoping someone could identify the dead. Sometimes, people looked at the dead in person at the morgue.

Alice Smith wasn’t going to cooperate with my deception, however. “You need to go to the check-in counter,” she told me.

I debated leaving and returning later, maybe tonight. Yet seeing as I was already here, I got stubborn.

“They told me to come here to the receiving entrance,” I said.

Alice blinked twice, and seemed to be on the verge of believing me. Why would I bother lying? I decided to nudge her along.

“The doctor told me to—”

“Doctor Sutra?” she asked.

“Yes. That was his name.”

Alice muttered angrily, shaking her head. Then she grabbed a clipboard hanging to the side and buzzed open the door.

I stepped inside and she shoved the clipboard at me.

“Sign there,” she said.

I used the pen hanging from a string attached to the clipboard, and dutifully scrawled across the designated area.

She snatched the clipboard from me. “Robert Berry,” she said, reading it.

“That’s right.”

She scowled. “Do you have some identification?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, extracting a fake driver’s license from my wallet.

With her thumb, she clicked the pen several times. Then she shrugged and wrote down the fake driver’s license number. After hanging the clipboard back onto the wall, she nodded her head, and said, “This way.”

I followed her down the hall, and my stomach tightened the closer we approached a large green door. She glanced at me before she opened the door and then ushered me within. The west wall was full of what appeared as giant drawers. In some of them lay the cold dead, the temperature lowered to retard decomposition.

Big Alice approached one of the drawers.

“Kay Durant,” I said quietly.

“What?” she asked over her shoulder, with her meaty fingers already clutching a handle.

“Her name was Kay Durant.”

Alice Smith let go of the handle and faced me. “Kay Durant is not Jane Doe.”

“I was told to come here and—”

“Doctor Sutra told you this?” Alice asked sharply.

“Before I spoke to him, a police officer said you had a woman in her thirties, pretty and—”

“What was the officer’s name?” Alice demanded, looking more suspicious by the moment.

“Sergeant Cole,” I said.

Alice muttered to herself. Then she said in an accusing voice, “Jane Doe was brought in on the fifteenth. Kay Durant was brought in on the nineteenth.”

“How did Kay die?”

“No!” Alice said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but—”

“I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong foot,” I said. “Kay was important to me. Yesterday, I learned she died. Frankly, I suspect foul play.”

“So do I. You.” Alice headed for the door we’d just come through. “We’re leaving.”

I’d handled this wrong, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. Money often solved a multitude of problems. So, I pulled out my wallet and withdrew a hundred dollar bill.

“Alice,” I said, “I represent an organization—”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think my job is worth a lousy hundred dollars?” She laughed loudly as she pulled out her cell phone. “You know what I’m going to do. I’m calling the police—”

I took three steps and snatched the cell phone. It was an older model that flipped open. I snapped it apart with a twist of my hands.

“I apologize, Alice.” I said evenly. I shoved the two pieces into my coat pocket. I took out three more hundreds, combining them with the original one.

There were red spots on Alice’s doughy cheeks. “How
dare
you break my phone? I ought to—”

I grabbed her nearest wrist and squeezed so she gasped in surprise and obvious pain.

“I can squeeze harder,” I said.

She shook her head.

I pressed the four hundred dollars into her hand and then folded her fingers over them. “These are yours—for the broken phone. You understand that, right?”

She nodded.

“If that isn’t enough, I can add more.”

She frowned.

“Make it three hundred more,” I said.

She moistened her lips as if she was going to start threatening me again. So, I squeezed her wrist to remind her of the other option. I could feel her bones grinding against each other.

“Please,” she whispered, wincing in pain.

“I want to see Kay Durant.”

Alice shook her head.

I frowned, uncertain what to do now. Despite my threats, I wasn’t going to break her wrist. Alice was proving cagier and tougher than I’d expected.

“I’d like to show you,” she said in a rush, perhaps misreading my frown. “But they’ve already shipped out the body.”

“Shipped where?” I asked.

Alice swallowed, nervously glancing at her wrist. “I don’t remember, but I can show you the paperwork.”

I let her go. She gasped as she cradled her wrist.

I withdrew another three bills and spread them out so she could see them. “These are for your broken cell, nothing more. We’re clear on that, right?”

She nodded.

“The cell breaking was an accident,” I said.

“No. You broke it on purpose, but I’m going to let it go. Now do you want to see the paperwork or not?”

I studied her, and finally said, “Yeah.”

A few minutes later, we were in another room at a computer. With a few clicks, Alice brought up Kay Durant.

“See?” Alice said. “We shipped the body to Switzerland, to Geneva. It went out yesterday morning.”

I pulled out a recorder and spoke the Swiss address, the airline and the transshipment number.

“You’ve been helpful,” I said, as I clicked off the recorder and shoved it into my coat. “Thanks.” I put the three extra bills by her keyboard.

She grabbed the money and stuffed it away.

“Walk me to the door and buzz me out,” I said.

Swiveling in her chair, Alice regarded me. “My brother is a weightlifter, and by the looks of it he could twist you into a pretzel. But I’ve never had anyone grab me as hard as you did back there, and my brother and I used to wrestle.”

“Steroids,” I said. “I inject them straight into the muscles. Sometimes I get steroid rages.”

Her features tightened. Then she got up and walked me to the door. She pressed a button and it buzzed. I took my leave, hurrying for my car, certain she was going to call security.

***

It was hot by the time I climbed into the Ford. I powered down a window and looked for a place to buy a Coke.

That hadn’t been the way to handle Alice. She might go to the police, and that would complicate matters. Money often unlocked doors, but it also made people curious, and it made them wary.