Hell's Maw (11 page)

“You're welcome back here anytime,” the owner told her as the dark-haired Pretor left the café.

C
ÁSCARA RETURNED TO
the Sector Hall of Justice for
Zaragoza and passed her findings over to her partner, Juan Corcel.

“They're a strange couple,” Corcel mused, “but the woman's story certainly checks out.”

“You still think they had something to do with the deaths?” Cáscara probed.

Corcel shook his head slowly as he pondered her question. “No, but I do think there's more to these two than meets the eye. The woman's too graceful, too poised. And the man, Grant—he freely admitted to being an ex-Magistrate. I just couldn't get a lead on what it is he does now.”

“Lot of work for ex-Mags,” Cáscara mused. “You think he's a merc on business out here?”

“The pattern of deaths has been random,” Corcel said, “but heaven help us if this is some prelude to a gang war or something of that nature.”

Cáscara nodded solemnly. “So, I guess we release them, then?”

“Yes,” Corcel agreed. “And let's hope our paths don't cross again.”

* * *

A
LITTLE PAPERWORK LATER
, Grant and Shizuka were released from custody. Corcel explained to Grant that they were confiscating the items he had retrieved from the scene—the metal throwing disc and the bloodred feather—as evidence and that he would need to sign a waiver to the effect that he had been informed of this, and to make himself available for follow-up questioning if anything should arise.

“I know the procedure,” Grant grumbled good-humoredly. “We're here for three days, staying at a hotel on the west bank called El Castillo.”

Corcel nodded. “I know it.”

“You have any problems, we will do what we can to help you,” Grant promised.

Then Corcel and Cáscara escorted Grant and Shizuka downstairs, taking a gloomy staircase down to the first floor, and from there they went through a security door and out into the main foyer to the Sector Hall. The foyer was a grand space, with wooden walls and an eight-foot-high decorative shield of justice affixed to a wall behind the reception desk. A Pretor in black-and-red armor was poised behind the desk, discussing some infraction with a tired-looking man with scruffy hair and a knot in his shoelace. Other Pretors were just heading out to go on patrol, while civilians waited for their turn either to speak with the Desk Pretor or to be collected by someone within the building.

The four of them—Grant, Shizuka, Corcel and Cáscara—stood there facing one another as the noise and rush of activity burbled all around them like bubbles in a carbonated drink.

“I am sorry that we had to keep you overnight,” Corcel said with genuine regret.

Grant shrugged. “Can't say that this was my first choice of cultural center to visit, but I kind of enjoyed seeing how you guys here run things,” he said amiably.

Shizuka bowed at the waist as she faced Cáscara. “Thank you for the understanding and sympathy you showed me last night, Pretor,” she said. “These are difficult times, but your behavior was faultless in the circumstances. I wish you swift success with your investigation.”

“Thank you,” Cáscara said with a smile.

Grant and Shizuka watched the two Pretors pace back through the security door that led to the staircase. It had been a lousy set of circumstances, but they had navigated it, and maybe even helped the investigation a little. Still, Grant could not help but wonder what it had all been about.

The pair turned to make their way through the busy
foyer and back to their hotel for a change of clothes. And then—

Pop!

It was like a lightbulb switching on in Grant's mind. One instant things in the foyer of the Sector Hall were entirely ordinary, the normal buzz of morning traffic as Pretors came and went about their business, shuffling paperwork and arming themselves for the streets. The next instant, Grant felt an eerie shiver, and it seemed as if the whole building had gone silent. It hadn't—that was just his instincts kicking in, years of experience as a hard-contact Magistrate alerting him to the sudden change in circumstances.

He turned, holding one protective arm up automatically before Shizuka where she walked beside him, scanning the foyer area. The Pretor at the desk had his head down, checking over a release form; two more Pretors, a man and a woman, dressed in the scarlet-and-black armor of the city, were just passing through the foyer on their way out to the street. A civilian waited in street clothes on a bench set against the wall before the desk, unshaven and with his dark hair in disarray, waiting to be seen. And Corcel and Cáscara were just leaving the foyer, returning upstairs to their desks, the door sealing behind them. But there was someone else, Grant spotted—a woman carrying a child's stroller through the double doors leading into the foyer, a scarf around her head, pulled low as if to hide her face. Grant sensed the nervousness in her posture, the way her eyes were darting anxiously left and right as she drew the stroller into the foyer. All this he took in in less than a second, honed instincts assessing everyone and everything as he locked in on the source of his concern—the woman.

Grant was moving straightaway, scrambling across the busy foyer toward the woman at a dead run as she pulled the nose of the stroller through the doors after her and let
them swing closed again. Her eyes were fixed on the desk where the Pretor was engaged in a discussion, and Grant seemed to watch in slow motion as her hand reached beneath her flower-print skirt, a flash of bare leg showing before she pulled free the blaster that was holstered there.

“Corpses for my mistress!” she yelled in embittered Spanish, squeezing the trigger and unleashing the first bullet at the Desk Pretor.

Her eyes widened as Grant hurtled himself into her in a tackle, disrupting her aim as the blaster kicked in her hand, and shoving her toward the floor. She struck with a loud thump, and Grant was on top of her in an instant. He pushed her down by the face as he grabbed for the blaster with his free hand, trying to wrench it from her grip.

“Muerte!”
she cursed as the blaster reeled off another shot—the bullet going wildly into the ceiling—before being yanked from her hand. “Death!” Her eyes were like pinpricks in their sockets, pupil and iris almost lost in the white abyss.

All around the foyer, people were reacting. Grant had disarmed the woman in two seconds flat. Grant was aware of voices asking what was going on, of blasters being drawn from holsters and people ducking behind convenient furniture as they tried to figure out what was happening and whether they were in the line of fire.

And then Grant realized that there was a second threat. The woman had brought in a baby cart before embarking on her killing spree, which made no sense—unless the cart contained something other than a child.

“The stroller!” Grant yelled as he held the woman down. “Somebody—”

The stroller blew up in a cacophony of sound and brilliance.

The reinforced glass of the Sector Hall foyer shattered into a million tinkling pieces, spraying across the room in a sudden spread of gravel-like shards. The grand double doors of the building shook in their frame, one lower hinge buckling as the door tottered in place, another melting into a lump. The noise of the explosion continued to ring through the room for at least ten seconds, its echo reverberating from the metallic surfaces within—the lamps, the door handles, the window frames and the computers at their desks.

In the aftermath of that explosion, the sound of nearby alarms assailed the air, exacerbating the ringing in the ears of the people who had been caught up so close to the exploding baby stroller.

* * *

I
N THE STAIRWELL BEYOND
, Pretors Corcel and Cáscara were thrown off their feet and now found themselves sprawled on the stairs, with Corcel sporting a bloody cut to his left temple where he had been thrown against the banister on his way down.

Cáscara was the first to rise, pushing herself warily up onto her knees, her head dipped down and swayed heavily.

“¿Qué pasó?”
she muttered uncertainly, looking up at the staircase. One of the lights was flickering where a circuit had been jangled, and the flashing made Cáscara feel slightly unreal. Then she saw her partner lying against the banister, his head bleeding from the cut there.

“Juan, are you okay?” Cáscara asked in Spanish, reaching for his arm. “Juan?”

Juan Corcel nodded heavily. “Head stings,” he admitted. “Do you know…what happened?”

“Bomb,” Cáscara reasoned without a moment's hesitation. Even as she said it, she was pushing herself up to a standing position, and a moment later she began trotting back down the stairs. “Came from the foyer,” she said, calling back to Corcel.

“Go,” Corcel told her. “I'll follow in a moment.”
Just as soon as I'm able to stand,
he mentally added as he felt a wave of nausea run through his gut.

* * *

B
EFORE SHE STEPPED
through into the foyer, Emiliana Cáscara pulled her Devorador de Pecados 9 mm pistol. The weapon had no safety, as that precaution had been deemed unnecessary when the Pretors had taken charge of enforcing the law decades ago. They were the ultimate authority in post-holocaust Spain.

She punched in the electronic code on the keypad beside the stairwell's door, and it unlocked with a soft click. The door featured narrow slats of reinforced glass, and although these had held, two of them now featured a spiderweb of cracking across their surface where they had caught the shock wave from the explosion.

Warily, Cáscara stepped through into the foyer, her blaster held up and ready. The scene that greeted her was carnage. The walls had been charred by the explosion, radiating circles of smudged black, concentrating at the external doors. Those doors were cracked and hung cockeyed, and one of the hinges had melted so that it was now a smoking glob of brass.

People were strewed across the space, Pretors and civilians, caught up in the shock wave, thrown to the floor. Among them, Cáscara spotted Grant and Shizuka—he
lying atop a light-haired woman with her skirt hitched halfway up her thighs, Shizuka lying just to the side of the doors that led onto the street.

Cáscara's eyes stopped moving as they spotted the gun lying on the ground beside Grant and the woman, and she trotted over toward it, her own weapon held ready, before kneeling down to snatch it up and pocket it. As she did so, Grant groaned and began to move.

Good,
Cáscara thought,
he's alive.

Grant's eyes flickered open and he saw Cáscara leaning over him, her dark hair fallen down over her shoulders, framing her striking face.

“Is something ringing?” Grant asked in a bewildered tone. “I can hear—”

“There's been an explosion,” Cáscara told him in a soothing voice. “Did you see—”

Grant coughed, swallowing a mouthful of dust that had been disturbed by the explosion. “Stroll—” he began, then coughed again. “Lady with a stroller. No kid, just a bomb. I…I dunno…”

The glamorous Pretor's gaze raced around the room, searching for the stroller that Grant spoke of. It wasn't here, which meant it had either been utterly destroyed in the explosion, or it had been moved elsewhere. Cáscara's glance settled on the woman who lay sprawled beneath Grant's hulking frame. “You saved her?” she asked.

Grant seemed momentarily confused, then realization dawned. “No,” he gasped. “She came in with a gun. Shouted something—something about death.”

Cáscara glanced back over Grant and the woman he was slumped against. He looked okay, just a few smears of dirt where debris had caught him; the woman meanwhile was unconscious—she could wait.

Cáscara stood up, scanning the room. Other people were groaning now, just recovering from the unexpected
explosion. Her partner, Juan Corcel, came walking into the room from the stairwell, his face pale with shock but otherwise looking steady. “Anything?” he asked.

Cáscara nodded solemnly. “Bomb,” she said, and she pointed at the woman lying beneath Grant. “Says she brought it. There was a gun, too—a Firestar M40.”

Corcel nodded, and regretted it immediately as he felt suddenly unbalanced. “You have the blaster?” he asked.

Cáscara confirmed she did before pacing across the room to the outside doors. She waited there a moment, her own blaster raised in readiness, listening for signs of a follow-up attack. Then, tentatively, she pushed the double doors open a crack and peeked through the space.

There was a small porch area there, sheltered from the sun and just two strides across, beyond which was a flight of three stone steps and a ramp leading down to the street. The mangled remains of the baby stroller stood in the center of the space, metal struts jagged and twisted, the whole thing belching thick black smoke. The walls of the porch were blackened with smoke, too.

So that was where the cart had ended up, Cáscara realized, although it didn't explain how it had got here. Grant had suggested that the woman had brought it inside the foyer—but how had it got out through the doors again without ripping through them?

Beyond the porch, a crowd was amassing in the bright morning sunshine of the street, eyeing the Justice Hall and the smoking debris there, keeping a wary distance for fear of further explosions. Cáscara pushed the door wider and stepped outside to address the crowd.

“Everyone move along,” Cáscara instructed in a loud voice. “Keep this area clear.” She was worried that there might be another bomb or another gunman, worried about everyone's safety—but she didn't want to panic the crowd either, just keep them out of harm's way.

The crowd began to shuffle reluctantly away. Liana Cáscara watched them carefully, trying to detect any hint of someone who was perhaps behaving suspiciously.