How Dark the World Becomes (7 page)

Now what? I could still hardly move. I wasn’t sure I could even get down off the goddamned toilet without falling on my face. Then the door to the head opened, someone came in, and started looking in the stalls, one at a time. There were only three stalls, and I was on the end closest to the inside wall. He got to mine last, slowly pushed open the door, looked in, and laughed.

“Man,” Henry said, “I know people who would kill for a picture of this.”

*   *   *

Much later, people would look back on “The Quann Sit-Down” and say that it was the second most amazing escape of my life. I think taking out Ricky was really the most amazing, but for some reason, nobody talks about that. Instead, they talk about Quann’s . . . and the other.

It’s creepy to hear people talk about you like that, as if you’re a character in history, even if luck and circumstance make it turn out that—you know—you are. It’s especially weird if you know all you did was squat on a toilet seat and try like hell not to fall off. 

I often wonder how many of the “amazing” things in history really just involved the equivalent of someone squatting on a toilet seat and not falling off. 

SEVEN

Bernie the Rat. What a name, huh? You gotta love a guy who calls himself a rat. He was wearing gray silk pinstripe slacks—banker pants, he called them—with red suspenders, just like the big shots. The look was . . . not spoiled, exactly, but certainly altered by the faded yellow and red “Gearloose Star Tour” tee shirt, some
mechnod
band that that been popular on Terra maybe a decade ago. 

Bernie was mostly bald, but with a faint shadow of fuzz cut so close you couldn’t really tell where the skin started and the hair stopped. That and the wrinkled face and deep-set eyes made him look older than I remembered, old enough that he was starting to look young again, like a baby. 

Bernie had been an old-school
shtarker
, back when the world was younger, but he gave it up to run a fence and sell information. He had a reputation among the old guys as about the toughest son of a bitch in the Quarter, and he probably could have run the place if he’d worked hard enough at it, but instead he walked away. He told me once he just got tired of all the violence. I can relate.

One thing’s for sure, he’s still a wiry little son of a bitch, and impossible to kill—enough people have tried. After a while, they just get tired of hunting him, because once he goes to ground in the Quarter, forget it, and then he starts ratting out all
your
secrets. Everybody’s got ’em, and Bernie the Rat knows most of them. 

I’ve never tried to kill him. I think it would be like burning a book because you don’t like what it says, and I’m not much into book burning. 

“So, Bernie, you find out anything about two leather-heads trying to get off-planet?”

“Ooo. Very interesting. There’s this hot babe that Kolya wants to poke, she’s looking for a way off for ’em.”

“Yeah, that much I know. But who are they?”

He shook his head and frowned. 

“Who are they . . . don’t know. But I think they got something to do with that shooting, up-canyon. Very weird. Very weird.”

I’d heard there had been some high-level leather-head gunned down, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the details. Arrie was right about that—didn’t give a mouse fart about leather-head politics, no matter how violent it got. It wasn’t just a species thing—they really do own everything, and much as I like Arrie, in a cautious, eyes-open kind of way,
they’re
the problem for us down here in the Quarter. So when bosses start killing each other, smart slaves just look the other way. 

“I heard a little about the shooting,” I said, “but educate me.”

“Okay. Sure. Leather-head with
serious
buckage—I’m talking stinking rich, like in the top ten of the
e-Varokiim
—named Sarro e-Traak, him and his driver got shot dead in his limo. Secure parking facility, all closed up. Very weird. Couple other leather-head bystanders killed at the scene. First reports were they were provosts, but not so. Just rubberneckers—wrong place, wrong time. Rumors like that . . . big guy gets shot, everybody starts grabbin’ for their ass and getting the information fucked up, you know?”

I nodded.

“So big hunt going on, ’cause his little kids were with him. No sign of them yet, but they’re dead, too. At first Munies thought the Human bodyguard—guy named Bony Jones—was on the inside, maybe lined the whole thing up, ’cause he was missing from the scene, but they found him dead the next day.”

“Maybe he
was
on the take and his partners did him,” I offered, but Bernie shook his head.

“Don’t think so. Don’t think so. Ballistics on the slugs in him matched those in e-Traak, and Bony’s blood was at the scene, so it looks like he ‘died of wounds sustained,’ as they say. Haven’t found the bodies of the kids yet, but give it a day or two. I figure the killers took the kids’ bodies and hid them, ’cause long as there’s a chance they’re still alive, the Munies will make finding the kids the top priority, and every Munie looking for the kids is one less looking for the silencers. But the kids are dead.”

“Any reason to think the bodyguard was on the inside, other than going missing?”

“Just that he’s Human.” He looked at me as if that was supposed to be significant, and when I shrugged, he shook his head. 

“You don’t know about the e-Traak fortune? Sasha, Sasha . . . you gotta pay more attention. E-Traak family money was behind AZ Tissopharm—the big chemical outfit that brought all us Human workers here forty years ago and then pulled the plug on the operation, left us scratching dirt with the chickens. I don’t even know what the guy was doing on-planet—usually I hear he stays a dozen or so light-years away. It’s not exactly healthy for him here.”

No, apparently not.

I’d heard the name e-Traak before, but I didn’t get the association until Bernie filled in the blank. Over a hundred thousand Human workers had been brought here to open the big pharmaceutical operation based on the native Peezgtaan mold spores that were supposed to revolutionize Varoki medicine. The company went bust, but everyone here had return-passage bonds to Earth as part of their contracts. Then it turned out the bonding company was bust, too. In both cases, e-Traak family money had been behind the companies, and in both cases they’d gotten their money out before the collapse. 

And if that sounds as if it should be illegal in any sort of system that’s fair, then maybe you’ll understand why folks around here don’t have much love for the
Cottohazz
anymore. Too many bony lizard thumbs on the scales of justice.

“Okay. So what do the two flight-prone leather-heads have to do with all this?” I asked.

He nodded rapidly, as if he were a bloodhound who’d picked up the scent again.

“Ballistics at the scene makes it two shooters, one for e-Traak and one for his driver. There’s also something weird about the weapons they were using—haven’t been able to find out the details yet, but it’s got the provosts sure these guys are real special killers. Connect the dots. A couple silencers get brought in from off-planet—real pros, good enough to penetrate a secure facility and take out old Sarro, his kids, driver, bodyguard, and anyone standing around watching. Anyway, they do the deed. What comes next? Time to leave.”

Maybe. But something just didn’t add up.

“We know the kids aren’t kidnapped?” I asked. 

He nodded.

“Only fools are positive, but I’d say ninety percent. Blood of one of the kids was on Jones
and
at the original scene. Besides, no percentage in keeping them alive. This is a very,
very
rich family, Sasha. You never, ever kidnap kids from families this rich, because all that buys you is a life of running, and a very ugly end. If you’re going to fuck with them at all, better kill ’em and be done with it.” 

“The family won’t do the same if the kids are dead?”

“No. No. You’re a hopeless romantic, Sasha, God love you. But the truth is, it ain’t a very romantic world.”

I already had that much figured out. But hell, everyone was a romantic compared to Bernie—with the possible exception of Kolya.

“See, with the kids dead, it’s easier to disappear,” he went on. “No contact for the ransom transfer, no buckage to trace, not as many leads without the kids to help. Kidnapping is a humiliation, and that you have to deal with if you want to stay on top. You know? But death . . . death is just a tragedy, and tragedies you endure, with dignity. Besides, now that the kids are gone, somebody else in the family inherits all that buckage. Very consoling. Very consoling.”

*   *   *

Bernie had given me part of the puzzle, but not a part that helped with my immediate problems all that much. I was holed up in a little flat in a building Henry owned. Shower, kitchenette, foldie-bed, and a desk with a viewer was about all there was. In a funny kind of way, I liked it. It was basic, and right now, basic was good. My environment was stripped down to bare essentials, uncluttered, and that helped my thinking. If you don’t think that your environment shapes the pattern of your thinking, you don’t know much.

If I was careful—and I was—I could still move around a bit during the day, like to find Bernie. I just dressed like a gutter bum, and nobody looked twice. I kind of liked the sense of freedom that gave me, but I wasn’t stupid enough to press my luck.

“So what’s our move, boss?” Henry asked as I poured him hot tea. 

Where would I be without his guy? He could have just stood back and watched, or could have turned me over to Kolya, but he’d gotten me out of Quann’s without anyone recognizing me, and gotten me here to this place, where I’d been able to sleep off the drug. Why? I’d asked him.

“Maybe I don’t want your job any more than you want Kolya’s,” he’d answered.

Yeah, maybe not. But I doubted that either one of us could afford the luxury of that choice much longer.

Kolya had scoured the city for me all last night. He’d regroup today, think things over, but he’d start beating the bush tomorrow at the latest. Beating the bush meant hurting my people, so what was our move?

“We punch,” I answered. “But if we punch now, we’re punching blind. We aren’t strong enough to punch everywhere, so we have to look for a soft spot. There’s something with these two leather-head silencers that’s mixed up with all this, but I can’t make it out. We’ve got to make somebody talk to us, and right now—tonight.”

“Archie?” Howard asked.

“No. Too hard to get to. Archie, Bear . . . everybody’s going to be bunkered up.”

“Okay, so who then?”

*   *   *

The “glass” on the balcony sliding door was actually a high-density synthetic, but that was pretty standard on these upscale lease units, and my ultrasonic cutter went right through it. I reached in the hole and undid the latch, and then slid the door open, slow but steady. I hadn’t done any of this second-story stuff in quite a few years, but I was surprised how it all still seemed like second nature. I always used to cable down along the rock borders between units, like I did tonight, but—being young, dumb, and full of cum—I used to wear a parasail and just exit off the balcony instead of climbing back up. With all the weird crosscurrents, I was lucky I never broke my neck. This trip, I planned to use the elevator when I was done.

I was in a breakfast nook off the kitchen. Not big, but nice: pale carpet, off-white walls and ceiling, two paintings on the walls, one nice abstract statue on a shelf. Tasteful, but my appraiser’s eye told me there was nothing here I’d risk a jump off the balcony for—the real artistry was in the arrangement. The carpet wasn’t thick, but there was something so perfectly cushioned about it that it felt like the floor wasn’t hard and solid underneath. I looked around—its simple elegance whispered luxury and major buckage, and with a sixth-level bay balcony view of the canyon, the apartment itself was worth a hundred times whatever stuff was in it. 

There was movement in the next room. I drew the gauss pistol and stepped back to blend into the shadow of the drapes by the sliding door. 

She came into the dark room—alert and curious but not, as near as I could tell, alarmed. There was a little draft from the door, and she went to close it. It was only when she saw the fifteen-centimeter circular hole cut in the glass that alarms started going off in her head, but it was way too late by then. Before she could react, I had my left arm around her neck and shoulder, hand clamped over her mouth, and the muzzle of the pistol pressed against her right temple. She froze, but I could feel the sweat break out on her face.

“No sound,” I said in a low whisper. “You understand?”

She nodded quickly.

“They’re here?”

She didn’t respond for a second or two, so I moved the muzzle of the pistol forward from her temple and let it rest in her eye socket. She tried to turn away but I held her in place. 

“They’re here?”
I repeated insistently, and she nodded.

“What room?” I loosened the grip on her mouth. If she was going to scream, she’d start with a big gulp of air, and that’s all the further she’d get.

“Please don’t kill them,” she whispered. “Just let them go,
please
.”

“Lady, I don’t know what that son of a bitch Arrie told you about me, but here’s the deal: I’m not smuggling a couple of paid silencers off this or any other rock—not when they knocked off a guy so big they’re going to have half the provosts this side of Terraspace looking for them.” I didn’t bother to add
“and not when they got some little kids’ blood on their hands,”
because that was personal, not professional. 

“I don’t know why you double-crossed me with Kolya,” I went on, “and I don’t really care. I figure you’re just following somebody’s orders, and that’s who’s on my hit parade. The two leather-heads in the next room are as good a place to start as any. Either way, their murdering days are over.”

It felt like she was going to faint in my arms, but I held her up and pushed the pistol against her head harder.

“Now, which room?”

“They’re not the killers,” she whispered.