Alien Blues (16 page)

The comforting notes of a siren filled the air.

The man swiped again and David held the cushion up to deflect the blow. It was a feint. The man's hand whipped down and across, ripping through David's shirt and lightly grazing the skin. Blood beaded in a line across his belly.

Memories echoed in his mind, and suddenly he was crouched in the Little Saigo tunnels, with no place to run.

“Come on, Jewboy. You want some of this?”

David shook the memories away and took a step sideways. The killer was impatient, he would move first. He would feint and lunge, and David would be ready. He looked behind him for some kind of weapon, and saw a lamp turned on its side. He snatched it up off the floor, wrenching the cord out of the floor plug.

David swung the lamp and the man took a step backward, then rushed forward, slashing at David's hand. David grabbed the man's forearm and yanked, spinning him till his back was to David's face. David kicked the inside of the man's knee. The man grunted and sagged. David wrapped the lamp cord around his neck, crossed the ends, and yanked hard.

The man choked and flopped, bringing the knife up and jabbing at David's eyes. David jerked back, and the cord slipped out of his hands. The man fell to his knees.

Feet pounded the staircase and a uniformed policewoman crouched in the doorway. She aimed and fired. The gun did not go off.

The blond man ran for the doorway.

“Watch the razor!” David shouted.

The man flicked his wrist, fast and vicious.

The cop screamed and covered her eyes. She stumbled backward, blood dribbling through her fingertips. There were footsteps and shouts from the stairwell.

The blond man kept going and David ran after him.

String was halfway up the stairs, pistol at the ready in his left fin, a knot of cops in protective padding right behind him.

“
No
shoot
,” String yelled. “
No shoot
, is Silver!”

The blond man whipped back around, tennis shoes skidding on the polished wood floor.

“Down!” String shouted.

David hit the floor.

Guns blazed in the stairwell—the deep rap of police assault rifles and the resonant boom of a heavy caliber pistol. String fell backward, tucking himself into a ball like a frightened porcupine. The blond man somersaulted down the steps behind him, flowers of blood blossoming on his back and neck.

“Police officer!” David croaked. “I'm a cop!”

“Hold fire!”

A shot echoed.

“I said
hold fire
.”

The hallway smelled like a firing range. David took a deep shaky breath, the floorboards cool against his cheek. The officer behind him whimpered. David crawled toward her, and pulled her blood-soaked hands away from her eyes.

She jerked and squirmed away.

“It's Silver,” he said. “I'm a cop. You saved my life, you know that? You saved my life.”

He took a handkerchief from his pants pocket.

A deep slit ran from the left side of the woman's forehead, across her eyes, the bridge of her nose, and her right cheek. David wondered if he would vomit.

“I know,” he said. “It hurts.”

Blood soaked through the handkerchief and ran between his fingers. He grabbed a chunk of foam and pressed the edge to the wound.

“No, be still. Be still.”

Someone stood at his elbow.

“Hold this,” he said. “Not over her
nose
. There, like that. Press hard.”

He stood up and went to Judith Rawley. Her head, nearly severed, lolled backward over the chair. A bib of blood made a half moon under the torn windpipe. David was vaguely aware of the people who filled the room, making an ungodly clatter and mess in their wet shoes and vests. Judith Rawley would have to clean for days, and her work would go to hell. Someone tried to talk to him and he waved them away.

He crouched in front of Judith Rawley, carefully easing her head forward, fitting it back to her neck. Her eyes were dull and uncaring.

“Hold on,” he said. “Hold on. We'll have an ambulance here any minute.”

Her hair hung limply over her shoulder, soaking up the blood on her neck. Beautiful silky hair. David gently pushed it back behind her ears.

TWENTY-FOUR

David watched the rain splash into his cup and turn the coffee grey. He shivered, clenching his teeth so they wouldn't chatter. Raindrops ran in streams down his face and into the collar of his shirt.

There were too many lights. They hurt his eyes.

Two men helped String toward an ambulance. The Elaki moved slowly, stiffly.

“Listen,” one of them said. “We ought to get a stretcher.”

“No, is not the necessity.”

“He get hit?” David asked.

“Naw.” The attendant was grinning. “Recoil of the gun knocked him down the stairs. Too much caliber for an Elaki.”

David frowned. “Where'd you get the gun, String?”

“The Mel has recommended it.”

“
Mel
told you to use it?”

The Elaki swayed. “The recommendation was to practice first, but there was not the time. Is good gun. Works the job.”

“How'd you get here, String?”

“I was—”

“Just a coincidence, String? You show up at the restaurant, and Puzzle gets killed. You show up here, and Judith gets killed.”

A shadow damped the lights and Halliday stood close to David.

“He was at the precinct, David, when your call came through. Doing reports he said you asked for.”

“I have the trouble getting computer to accept the voiceprints, and I—”

“He rode with me,” Halliday said. He looked at the medic. “He hurt bad?”

“A lot of soft tissue damage. Painful. He'll be stiff and sore a few days.”

“Take care of him.” Halliday took David's arm. “Detective Silver and I appreciate your assistance, Mr. String.” He nodded and led David away, guiding him up under the eaves of the warehouse.

“David, are you all right?”

“Yeah.” David pulled his arm free. “Fine, Roger.”

Two ambulance attendants maneuvered a stretcher toward an emergency van. Judith Rawley's hand slipped out from under the sheet and flopped with the bounce of the wheels.

“For Christ's sake, Roger, they're getting her wet. Can't they even …”

Halliday took David's arm and walked him away from the warehouse.

“Come on, I'll drive you home.”

“I don't want to go home! I want to know why our guns didn't work.
Theirs
did. Ours are the ones supposed to be field proof! And why—”

Halliday stopped and looked at him. David had a flash, suddenly, of hospitals, psychiatrists, departmental counseling. He remembered Millicent Darnell, crying softly while the EMTs hauled her away.

“Come on, David. Go on and get in the car. We can clean up the details later.”

David got in.

“I'll take you home to Rose.” Halliday slammed the car door. David felt like a child. Halliday got in on the other side, shaking drops of rainwater off his coat onto David's knees.

“Why don't you punch in the directions to your house. You live pretty far out, don't you?”

“Not my house.” David put in the address of his mother's apartment. “Kellam Street. About a twenty-minute drive.” He clenched his fists and stared at the floor.

Kellam Street was quiet, rain-sweet, and dark. The streetlight in front of Lavinia's building was out. Halliday watched David through the open window.

“You sure this is where you want to be?”

“Yeah.” David glanced over his shoulder. “Too far to go home tonight. I'll crash here.”

He headed up the sidewalk, knowing that Halliday watched him until he was inside the building.

Her initials were still on a brass plate next to the door. LHS—Lavinia Hicks Silver. David punched in the access codes.

He paused in the doorway. Rain shone on the windows, and a streetlight cast a glint of yellow into the room. He switched on a light, startled, as always, by the stark emptiness of his mother's home. The floors were wood, the walls white. There were no pictures, no curtains. The living room held one chair, a footstool, and a round wood table with a book on it.

David walked across the floor, footsteps echoing in the emptiness, and stood in the doorway of her bedroom. A large wardrobe stood against the wall. The bed was narrow, an antique iron bedstead, made up with a spotless white cotton bedspread. A white afghan was folded at the bottom.

There was nothing else in the room—no knickknacks, no pictures of grandchildren, no shoes under the bed.

David opened the wardrobe and inhaled the scent of his mother. It was not perfume he breathed, his mother could not bear such things. It was simply the smell of the sturdy wood dresser, the cotton sweaters, and the offbeat tang of despair.

David closed the wardrobe and went back into the living room. He ran a hand along the wall, looking for the scar where his mother had hammered a steel hook and anchored her rope.

The living-room light had been burned out the night he found her. He had walked through the doorway into the darkness, startled by the kneeling silhouette. A car had driven by, the headlights illuminating her bowed head, glinting on the soft white silver of her hair. A burst of loud music had come from the car's radio, then the headlights had snapped away, the music receding, leaving David alone in the dark.

And then, after a stone silent moment of paralysis, he had lifted her from the floor, and yanked the rope, ripping away a chunk of dry wall. Even as he had checked for heartbeat, pulse, and respiration, his mind had ticked coldly, noting the signs of advanced death, the small blood vessels in his mother's eyes that had bled when the rope compressed her neck.

He hadn't noticed the wound on her left wrist, a scalping of the delicate inner skin over the heavy blue veins. She had done it herself, just before she died, the razor blade left in the bathroom sink in a dried gob of flesh and brown blood.

The coroner had looked at the wound and turned a startled face to David, before the professional mask shuttered the man's emotions. He'd known David for years—they'd met over numerous corpses. He would not have connected David's mother to Little Saigo.

But the coroner had seen too many other wounds like it—some self-inflicted, some not—not to recognize the implication.

Lavinia had not wanted to die bearing a toogim, the stamp of Little Saigo, that had grown so deeply into her skin that she'd severed a nerve to get it out. Wearing a toogim fashioned to match her body chemistry had been a matter of survival in Little Saigo, identifying her as made, a do-not-touch sign, putting her under the protection of Maid Marion. One had a toogim from Marion, or a tattoo from the tunnel rats, or the chances of being robbed, beaten, and murdered went up exponentially.

Even children wore them, though David hadn't. Lavinia had been adamant that he would never be marked, convinced that such a stamp would keep him from rising above Little Saigo into Saigo proper.

He had argued that
not
having one made his life dangerous. She told him to restrict his movements, and said there were worse things than death.

David had been shocked by his mother's suicide, but not surprised. He had seen it hit her before. One moment, placid, accepting; the next, overwhelmed with depression so heavy she would sink in a chair and not move for hours.

He had gone over the apartment carefully, but he hadn't been able to find the discarded talisman. Even now, she would see he didn't have one.

Packing her things would not take long. It was time to let the apartment go.

David went into the kitchen. He opened the cabinet over the sink and took out a white metal box—white, white, always white. In the box were all the papers his mother kept—recipes, a will, bank numbers, keepsakes. There were three letters his father had written her, a picture he had drawn of a horse, and a thick bundle of handwritten recipes.

David thumbed through the box, finding a banded packet of checks. There were a lot of them, two thick inches of them, all dating from the Little Saigo years. Lavinia Hicks Silver from Ruth Silver, six thousand dollars. Lavinia Hicks Silver from Ruth Silver, seven hundred dollars.

David blinked, unsure that what he was seeing was real.

All those years she had told him they were abandoned—his father's people didn't want them, she had none of her own. And all the while his grandmother had sent checks—as much, it seemed, as she could spare. Why had his mother never cashed them? Why all the years in Little Saigo, working and sweating, doing piecework for the factory pimp—sewing pockets onto jeans, scraping to get back out? Was it
pride
? Had the family made demands she could not meet? They had gone
hungry
. What incredible hurdle had his mother not been able to see her way around, what had made her put him to bed, hungry and cold and afraid, with help right there for the taking?

What kind of anger was this?

David jammed the checks back in the box, and a scrap of paper fell to the floor. It was an old piece of notebook paper, the kind he'd used in school. He picked it up. One one side was a recipe for chili; on the other an old budget. It reminded him of the note that Rose had left him. The figures were smaller, but they told the same story—more outgo than income.

He thought of Rose, juggling figures late at night. His mother had done the same, there in Little Saigo, probably as he slept. He wiped a tear away, but more came, and more, till he sat on the floor and let them come.

In his mind he saw Judith Rawley, and her long, long hair, and he knew she had a budget somewhere just like this one. He thought of his daughters, grown up, with daughters of their own, and he knew that they, too, would sweat figures into the night.

The floorboard, uneven in the groove, shifted under his thigh. David got his pocketknife out and pried a corner loose. It moved, but would not come up. He ran his fingertip around the edges. Recently glued. He ran the blade of the knife all around the edges of the loose board, slid the thin blade beneath the wood. The wood creaked, then popped up, snapping the knife blade in half.