How Dark the World Becomes (3 page)

There aren’t a lot of things better than jambalaya, in my opinion, especially with a full-bodied red—it doesn’t have to be expensive, just a good working guy’s table wine. I’m not sure how good you’d consider our local hydroponic red; we don’t call it “Piss-Can Special Reserve” for nothing. But Cinti’s jambalaya was damned good—almost as good as mine—and she’d made it special for me, which was nice. 

My condo was a corner unit, with no windows—but there’s not much to see anyway. The walls were original stone on two sides and low-density feldspar aggregate foam on the other two. I’d added paneling to those two foam-stone walls—well, composite armor, actually. The condo itself was four rooms—kitchen, den, master bedroom, and a small guest bedroom that did double duty as a home office. A small bath was off the den and a bigger one off the master bedroom, but big is relative; two people had trouble moving around in there at the same time. The open area in the bedroom wasn’t much, either, because we’d put in a couple walk-in closets.

Cinti and I had painted broad, diagonal swaths of color on the walls—warm browns and dark reds—to damp down the paleo-industrial look of the place, and tie in to the big Persian carpet in the den. Maybe it wasn’t much, but I liked it. The whole thing was maybe 100 square meters.

We’d been together for six years. Sometimes it seemed like just a couple months; other times, it seemed as if we’d always been together. She’d been Jim Donahue’s girl when I first met her. Donahue ran most of the action in my part of the Quarter, and I sort of worked for him. It wasn’t as organized back then as it is now, but he was definitely higher up the pecking order than I was. Cinti and I hit it off right away—probably because of jazz, blues, and
jonque
. I loved them all, and she had this amazing vocal range and a smoky, sexy voice that melted my heart one minute and set me on fire the next. At first we were just pals, but Cinti’s a hot-blooded Brazilian, and my blood was plenty hot too. It helped that Jim was a pig. 

I’m not sure I’d have been able to work out the plan without her on the inside, but we did it, and I brought down Jim and took over most of his operation. Kolya was moving on a couple other old-timers at the same time, and so he and I ended up working together—Sasha and Kolya, the two young Ukies who shook everything apart, then put it all back together again, only better than before.

Cinti and I were going to open an upscale
jonque
club. She’d sing, maybe manage it even, but there’d never been quite enough money to do it the way we wanted to. Ricky was right about one thing; the clinic was a money sink. But when Big Meg’s delivery had gone bad on her youngest daughter, it was Doc Zhan who saved both their lives. What’s that worth? 

So, yeah, the clinic cost money. It cost Cinti and me something else, too. There hadn’t been a lot of good evenings lately. This was turning into the best one we’d had in a long time. She’d been moody a lot lately, so her smiling and joking over dinner made it seem like old times. Cinti looked really good, too. She wore a pale yellow knit top that didn’t leave much to the imagination, and the color suited her, set off her olive-colored skin, dark eyes, and black curls.

She really did look sensational.

*   *   *

I lay on my back afterwards, all but spent and enjoying the feeling. Cinti curled up in the crook of my arm, her fingers playing with the hair on my chest. After a few minutes, she shifted and then kissed me on the cheek.

“Gotta pee,” she said and slid off the bed and padded across the carpet to the bathroom, her hips swaying from side to side to the rhythm of a samba in my head, and I smiled. She closed the door behind her, and I heard the lock click.

Did you ever wonder why new stuff always sells better than the old, proven stuff? Why the pitch in sales and entertainment and—just about everything—is always about what’s
new new new?
You’d think that once we found stuff we liked, we’d stick with it. But whenever somebody says “new,” or we see something that looks different, or sounds different, or smells different, right away it’s got our undivided attention. Maybe you think that’s because we’re all idiots, with short attention spans and no common sense, but you’re wrong. It’s because of survival genetics. 

Back when our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, maybe not even smart enough to talk to each other, the environment was pretty monotonous most of the time. If something new happened—the grass moved, the smell of the air changed, birds started singing, birds
stopped
singing—those guys either gave that their absolute, undivided attention, and I mean right
now
, or they didn’t make it into our gene pool, ’cause they got eaten.

Cinti had never locked the bathroom door before.

The adrenaline surge made my scalp tingle as I rolled over to my left and pulled open the drawer of the night table. That’s where I always kept a loaded H&K 13mm AutoMag, but tonight it wasn’t there. 

“Shit!” I said, and I heard the door to Cinti’s walk-in closet open behind me. I looked up and saw Ricky’s reflection in the mirror as he brought his gauss pistol up. I could hardly recognize him, except by his stupid goatee. Christ! How tough did he think I was? He was wearing full body armor and a visored helmet, with V.I. goggles underneath. This was definitely overkill for one unarmed naked guy in bed—and it pissed me off.

I rolled forward as his pistol fired—a series of four quick soft snaps—and I felt the burn as a flechette cut a furrow across my left shoulder blade. The rest of the burst blew up the lamp on the night table and plunged the room into darkness. For a half second, as I hit the floor beside the bed, I thought the darkness was an improvement, but then I remembered the V.I. goggles under the clear bulletproof visor. I grabbed a shoe, threw it at the mirror on the wall, and got lucky. It shattered, so at least he’d have to come around the bed to see me. I reached for another shoe—anything—and my fingers closed on the leather of the shoulder holster I’d dropped by the bed. 

I pulled out the Hawker 10mm—for whatever good it would do me. No telling how good Ricky’s body armor was, but some grades I don’t think even the sabot round for the Hawker would punch. As it was, all I was loaded with were plain old flat-head slugs for target practice. They’d hardly leave a bruise through armor.

He was walking now. Any second he’d be around the bed, and that would be it. 

Or maybe not. 

Maybe he’d overthought this whole thing, or maybe he’d let his hatred overpower his common sense. Vision-intensification goggles? Like he planned to put out the lights and then “stalk” me in the dark, toy with me—first terrify me, then kill me. He should have just shot me.

“Jo-Jo! Evac!” I shouted. Evac was notification that I needed to get out—probably because of a fire or something like that—and to turn on the emergency lighting. The evac lights were set low around the room—so they’d be below smoke level—and they shined up. They came on, and Ricky’s V.I. goggles must have immediately whited out. 

Now, if Ricky were smart, he’d have waited in his bulletproof shell for the two or three seconds it would take for the goggles to reset to the new ambient light level, but I didn’t figure it that way. I sat up, bringing the Hawker up in both hands, and sure enough, he pushed his helmet visor up to pull off the goggles. You gotta love a guy like that. I shot him once, in the eye—the Hawker sounding like a bomb going off after Ricky’s quiet gauss pistol—and he fell down. He didn’t stagger, or stand in frozen shock for a moment; he just collapsed in a heap, like a marionette that someone had cut the strings on. Once he was down, he twitched a little, but I think it was involuntary—I’d guess he was dead before he hit the floor. 

I stood up and looked at him to make sure. There was a lot of blood on his face, but he was resting on his back, and all the extra blood had run back into the helmet, so there wasn’t much of a mess on the carpet. That was pretty considerate of him. 

I sat back down on the floor by the bed, grabbed the little wastebasket with pictures of elephants on it, and threw up into it. Then I had to put the wastebasket down before I dropped it, because I was shaking uncontrollably. 

I sat there awhile until the shaking mostly stopped, and as I did, I felt blood trickle down my back. I’d forgotten that the stupid son of a bitch had shot me. 

“Jo-Jo. Secure.” 

The lights went out, except for a little ribbon of light coming from under the bathroom door.
Cinti.
Now what the hell was I going to do with her?

I pulled on my slacks, turned on the overhead light, and got a towel out of a drawer in the bed pedestal. I wrapped it around my shoulder and back, mostly to keep from getting blood all over, and sat down on the bed. 

“Honey?”
I called, “have you seen my H&K? I can’t find it out here.”

No answer. I waited a minute or two. 

“Sweetie?
Are you okay in there? You been in there a real long time. Come on out, why don’t you?”

“You’re gonna kill me,” she said at last, her voice trembling with fear, and I could tell she was crying. 

“Aw, c’mon, Sugar. Let’s not argue over who’s trying to kill who,” I answered.

I could hear her sobbing now, and all of a sudden I felt bad. That was
Cinti
in there. Six years of my life, really the six best. Hell, I wasn’t going to kill her, but she didn’t know that, and that last smart remark was nothing but torture. 

“Cinti, you ever know me to kill two people in the same night? Think about it. It’s too messy.”

I let her think about it for a while.

“
Cinti?
”

“Yeah?”

“If I want to kill you, I can just come in there and kill you. You’re not good enough, even with the H&K, to stop me, and you know it. Your backstairs boyfriend was a professional killer in body armor, he took me by surprise and unarmed, and he’s out here getting stiff. So how well do you think
you’ll
do? Now toss the damned pistol out before I get angry.”

The door opened a crack, and she tossed out the heavy automatic. Cinti wasn’t stupid. I got up and picked it up and slipped the Hawker into the pocket of my slacks. The H&K was a real hand cannon, and it was . . . persuasive; people take one look at it and start babbling. The door opened again, and she stuck her head out, eyes wide, makeup smeared by tears. She looked at Ricky’s body on the floor and started crying again.

“Let’s go out in the living room,” I said. “We’re going to sit for a while, and you’re going to tell me everything. And I mean everything. Then you’re going to take a couple thousand in cash, and one suitcase of clothes, and disappear.”

“How do I know you won’t just kill me?”

“Cinti, if you’ve got a better offer, go ahead and take it.”

She went out into the living room. Before I joined her, I triggered my embedded comm link and squinted up Henry’s number from my autolist. 

“Yeah, boss,”
he answered inside my head.

“Cleanup in Aisle One.”

“On my way.”

FOUR

Henry and I cleaned up the apartment ourselves. He took care of Ricky’s body, and I packed Cinti off on the up-canyon red-eye maglev an hour before dawn, with a couple thousand in her pocket, as promised. One of Henry’s guys was with her, to make sure she showed up at Karla Bell’s place in Manaklak Bay. Karla owed me from a while back, and I lined up a singing slot at her jazz club for Cinti. Karla would put her up and make sure she stayed put. I was doing Karla as much of a favor as she was doing me; Cinti really was that good. Maybe if I’d opened the club we’d talked about, things would have been different. 

Water under the bridge. 

Later that morning I sat in my office, tried to figure my next move, and didn’t get anywhere useful. 

The story Cinti had told made ugly sense, ugly enough I believed it. Much as Ricky had it in for me, and much as Cinti made his dick stand up and salute, I thought Cinti was too smart to have gone along with this move if it was just Ricky on his own, and I was right. Kolya was behind it. That much Cinti knew, but not much more than that.

I figured maybe Kolya wouldn’t have tried moving against me, either, but he was always quick to recognize a fleeting opportunity. Ricky was ready to do the deed today; no telling how he’d feel next week. But why let him go after me at all? Was he that pissed off about me dragging my feet on the Laugh? Maybe. But that couldn’t be all of it. 

Ricky would be easier to control than I was, he must have figured, and Kolya would get a bigger slice of my action. Ricky was tough enough to keep the crew together, but he’d still need Kolya behind him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he also figured that Ricky wouldn’t inspire a lot of loyalty, and Kolya could play that to his advantage, too. 

Not that I’d been exactly a champ at inspiring loyalty lately, either. Even Henry had started wondering what the hell my problem was, although seeing Ricky dead on the bedroom floor had settled some of his worries. But Cinti . . . 

That was the big question I’d needed answered:
why?
 

The reason was simple. She saw a showdown coming between Kolya and me, if not today, then tomorrow, or next week, or next cycle, or whenever, but it was coming. When it came, she needed to be on the winning side if she wanted to survive. In addition to everything else, Cinti was a survivor, and one smart lady. She’d bet on me over Jim Donahue six years ago. Now her money was on Kolya. That was fairly discouraging.

How much would Kolya know I knew? If I knew he was behind the killing—and he knew that I knew—he’d figure his hand was forced and he’d have to keep going. I wasn’t sure I could convince him that I
didn’t
know he was behind it. Kolya wasn’t stupid, and he knew I wasn’t stupid. So how stupid could the two of us
pretend
to be to keep the peace? 

I really didn’t want a war with Kolya, not right now. Henry was ready, which was unusual for him. Normally, he was a pretty cautious guy, but I think he was just losing patience. “We gotta shit or get off the pot,” he’d said earlier this morning, before he went home. But Kolya had more guys than we did, and the hard truth was he was tougher than me, so there was a good chance we’d lose, and second prize in this war wasn’t going to be all that great.