Shoggoths in Bloom (42 page)

The man she’s come here to meet—the agent originally assigned to the rare-animal smuggling trade in Cascadia—is one Robert Brown, an interviewer of such rare talents he’s known in the business as the Confessor. Sanchez has always heard he’s a good cop, maybe even a decent man. The latter’s more common than the former; power breeds abuse.

But lately—according to the Cascadia ops who handled her briefing— he’s become erratic. Possibly obsessed. Possibly confused. Possibly on the take, and it’s hard to say which of the three possibilities concerns them more. She has a recognition code to use, but her instructions include feeling him out on other things too.

And even if Brown turns out to be honest—and despite this being the designated rendezvous spot—there’s no guarantee that the person or persons who found her have any connection to him. So when Sanchez stands, her hands in the air, the sleeping bag a puddle at her feet that she is careful to step clear of, she doesn’t identify herself as a Cascadia op. She just says, “I’m Rebecca Sanchez. I’m hiking through.”

The searchlight blinds her. The ground is a carpet of twigs and moss and needles, stabbing her bare soles and prickling between her toes.

“Poaching through, you mean,” the voice accuses, while she blinks and squints and forces herself not to shield her face with her hands. Her night vision’s shot for the next fifteen minutes anyway.

“You can check my gear,” she says for the second time today. “I’m not poaching. Just hiking. All I have is some food and equipment and a reader.”

There’s at least two of them, because while one approaches, the other keeps the blinding light trained on her face. That could be a bad sign or a good one. Sanchez gives up and just closes her eyes; at least it hurts less, and her eyelids, while translucent, will still limit the dazzle.

Instead of watching what she can’t see anyway, she listens.

She thinks the one who crunches over to her is male, by the stride, but she’s guessing and she’d be the first to admit it. So she says, as nonconfrontationally as she can, “Do you mind telling me who you are?”

There’s a rustle as whoever it is squats to go through her stuff. She hears the rattle of food packaging, the slick nylon sounds of her pack. The whisk of the tarp under her sleeping bag as he lifts and inspects it.

“We’re nobody you want to mess with,” he says, confirming that the first man who spoke is also the one who crouches by her feet.

“Do you live here?”

Personalize. Engage. If they’re common thieves, or bent on sexual assault, the more of a relationship she can build with them the safer she’ll be. If they’re Edgewater, and they followed her—well.

“This is our home,” he says. There’s more rustling, and then an exhale— too soft to call a grunt—as he stands. “Okay, your stuff checks out, Ms. Sanchez.”

He must make a gesture to his partner, because the blinding light falls off her face. She lets her eyes open, blinking savagely, and sees nothing in the night except a darkness so intense it sparkles. She knows it’s the rods and cones in her retinas firing, trying to make out any shape at all, but it will be minutes before that happens.

His hand must have gone to his belt, because an indirect glow illuminates both their feet and her gear—more or less neatly restowed. Enough light scatters that she can make out the dim outline of his face. He’s older, she thinks. Dark-skinned, his hair allowed to run a little wild.

She recognizes him from the images in the briefing.

“I understand,” she says. “Do you have a lot of problems with poachers here?”

He holds out the reader, the back open. The tangle of her climbing spikes peers out, visible more through texture and shape than color or shine. “I guess you’d know that as well as I do, Constable.”

She looks up at his face again. Of course, he recognized the gear.

His thin lips twist in a smile. “I figured they’d be sending somebody to check on me soon. Welcome to Rainier, Ms. Sanchez. I’m Robert Brown.”

He helps her pack the gear and hump it five miles through game trails to his camp. There was no second person, just a mount for the light and a remote. So he’s just as smart as she was warned, and she let him get the drop on her.

Not her finest hour, if the reports of his erratic behavior turn out true. Still, he’s perfectly civil the whole dark hike back to his bivouac. He has a tent and a camp chair, which he blackmails her into using by plunking down on the ground. No fire, but a tiny camp stove over which he boils water as they talk. Despite the heat of the day, night has come on with a chill, and the sweat drying on Sanchez’s neck makes her glad of the coffee. “So you found their site?” Brown asks, starting soup as she sips the second cup.

“Spotted the location,” she says. “I didn’t get a look at it. I met part of their cordon sanitaire, however.”

“Charmers,” Brown says. “I’m pretty sure they’ve each got an Edgewater uniform in their closet back home.”

“You might be right.” She lets the silence hollow out between them. Maybe he’ll fill it, maybe he won’t.

He lets it sway there until he takes her empty coffee cup away, wipes it out with a rag, and returns it full of soup. “I’ve never heard of a Rebecca Sanchez on the job. But they wouldn’t send a new kid out on a gig like this. So who are you really?”

“Mauritza Aguilar.”

He raises his eyebrows in something she could spin to herself as respect, gaunt cheeks illuminated by the can of propellant.

The soup base is dehydrated and reconstituted, but there are fresh things in it as well—gleaned plants, she imagines, hoping he knows his toadstools from his mushrooms—and it’s good. She drinks it slowly, to make it last and because it’s hot.

“What brought you out?” he asks, when she’s had time to get half of it inside her.

“Murder,” she says. “I’m not here to bust up your animal smuggling case.”

He bites his lip, and she makes a note of that for later. There’s something he’s not telling her. Of course, she’s not telling him that she’s here to check up on him . . .

He says, “Murder.”

“Portions of a dismembered body were recovered outside of Portland,” she says. “It’d been scrubbed down to the skin bacteria, but DNA from a tick head recovered from under the skin led back to Rainier. When Cascadia LEC checked for ongoing investigations in the area, the Interpol link came up. Didn’t they tell you that when they signaled that I was coming out?”

“No. Just the flash to expect somebody. I figured it was best to make sure you were who you said you were, in case the bad guys intercepted the flash and replaced you. It’d be too easy to slip an Edgewater op in.” “A lot of them used to be cops.”

He nods. “Body,” he says. “Was it ever identified?”

She is contemplating a lie versus the truth when he holds up a hand for silence.

“Corey Darwish.”

She says, “Should I be suspicious that you know that?”

“Not at all,” he says, poking the ground with a stick since he can’t stir up the fire. “He was my informant. I imagine his colleagues caught on.”

The man hauled Martha down a kind of long, narrow room with doors on each wall. A hall, that’s what it was called. She’d never seen on herself before, never seen the inside of any building by the cabin and shed, but she’d heard the word on videos, when Daddy still came to visit them.

Martha had kicked at first, and screamed as the man dragged her, but that just made him pick her up like a sack of vegetables and swing her around until she stopped screaming and wet herself and started to cry. Now she let him carry her, but she stared back over his shoulder at Matt’s head and made her small hands into fists. She should kick him, she thought, but she was too scared. She couldn’t make her feet move with any force.

Her only comfort was that two of his friends were slinging Matt along between them. Matt was bigger, and the men had tied his hands together behind him and were half-carrying him by his elbows. Matt kept his eyes stubbornly downcast, except when he glanced up to catch Martha’s eye. Sweat slid in rivulets across Matt’s shiny scalp; Martha knew he was as scared as she was, but he did not say anything.

The hall the man carried her down smelled strange, pungent and musty, like mold and old urine and Lysol. Like snakes. There were sounds from behind the doors, animal sounds. And people sounds, too: Martha was sure she heard a baby crying.

As long as she behaved, the man wasn’t rough. Just really in a hurry. He jerked open a door towards the far end of a hall and carried her through, setting her down on a cube-shaped chair with no regard for her wet pants.

The other men pushed Matt in behind her, and one knelt down to untie his hands. Matt turned, ready to hit, but the man blocked the blow easily and stood.

“You be good kids,” he said, as the one who had been carrying Martha slipped out of the room behind him. “Somebody will be in to see you in a minute.”

The door shut, and Martha heard it lock. “Freaks,” one man muttered on the other side.

“Shh,” said the one who had carried her in. “They’re just kids. They can’t help it.”

She was wet and the stale urine stank and burned her skin. As if it didn’t matter, Matt came over, his hands extended, and reached to put his arms around her. Martha burst into fresh tears.

“Hey,” Matt said. “Hey, hey. It’s okay. Maybe these people know where Daddy is. Did you think of that?”

It was like he’d opened up a book and showed her something wonderful. “Really?”

“Maybe,” he said. She could hear him warming to his own idea. “Hey, how else would they have found us, huh?”

“Oh.” She sat up, scrubbing her eyes.

Matt pulled back. “Let me see if I can find you something dry.”

As he moved around the room, Martha finally noticed where they were. This one room, alone, was almost as big as the cabin. There was blue carpet on the floor—Martha hadn’t seen carpet in person before, either, but she knew what it had to be—decorated with a bright pattern of dots. She liked the dots. You could play hopscotch on them, or they could be islands in a big lake with different kinds of animals and plants on each one. If you had some animals and plants to pretend with.

The furniture in the room was all bright, too—big plastic squares and rectangles. Some had open sides, and some had hinges, and some had plastic padding—like the one she was sitting on. Some were more like tables—child-sized tables, which Martha thought was the best idea ever—and some were more like couches.

The ones that were like tables had other bright things on them. They were toys—blocks and wires and dolls, balls and sticks, round-cornered rectangular objects with screens that looked like computers, only smaller.

Martha was beside herself with curiosity. She got up out of her chair. Her legs hurt where her wet pants rubbed against the insides of her thighs, so she walked in a funny stiff-legged way like a baby deer. That made her knees and hips hurt.

“They have toys,” she said. “So they must have clothes, right?”

Matt nodded. He was prying at the top of one of the hinged rectangles, trying to make it open. She heard the ticking sound as he pulled at the lid with his fingernails and they slid, over and over again. “I think it’s locked,” he said, and kicked it. Not hard, just in frustration.

A second later, the door to the room opened up again, and a new man stood in the doorway.

Martha jumped and turned, her shoes catching on the carpet. She stumbled but did not fall. Matt was beside her before the new man came in.

“Hi,” he said. He had a pile of cloth in his arms. “You must be Martha and Matt Darwish. I’m Dr. Klopft. I brought you some clean clothes.”

Martha pulled herself up as tall as she could and made her voice big. “Where’s my Daddy?”

It didn’t sound big enough, when it echoed all around the room. But Dr. Klopft put the clothes down on the nearest table, made his face sad, and said, “Well, Martha, I have some bad news for you. Your Daddy was hurt in an accident. That’s why I’m going to take care of you from now on.”

If she’d had time to think about it, she would have expected to burst out crying again. Instead, she got very still inside herself. Very still and very certain. If Daddy was hurt, it was because this Dr. Klopft had had something to do with it.

He waited, as if he expected an outburst. But Martha was patient— Daddy always said so, “Martha, you’re a very patient girl”—and she just waited back. Eventually, Dr. Klopft reached out and pushed the pile of clothes towards her.

“Here’s some clean clothes,” he said. “Can you take a bath by yourself? There’s a bathroom right through that door.”

Martha, who had gotten used to checking traps and cooking on the wood stove since Daddy went away, just blinked at him.

“Right,” Dr. Klopft said. “You go get cleaned up. And I’ll go see if we can get some dinner, what do you say?”

Sanchez finishes her soup and sets the cup aside. When Brown does not look up, she clears her throat and says, “Home office is wondering how the Klopft thing is coming. Aside from the murder, I mean.”

“Klopft thing? Which part of it?”

There aren’t supposed to be parts. “Trafficking in endangered species for the pet and medicinal trade?”

“That?” Now Brown meets her eyes. He smiles. Half-smiles. “I have enough to hang him, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“But you haven’t called in backup. Or a strike team.”

“I haven’t,” Brown agrees.

“So there’s something more you’re after.”

Gingerly, he drops the lid over the top of the cooking fuel, snuffing the crawling blue flame. The sudden darkness after reveals, a little surprisingly, just how much light that pathetic curl of fire cast. Or possibly it says something about the adaptability of the human eye, because she’s as blinded as she was by the dazzle of his lantern, but it doesn’t last long. A few blinks, and she can see the shape of his pale khaki shirt-cuffs against the brown of his hands. Not the colors, of course—but her mind fills them in for her.

“So,” he says, “who is it you were working for again?”

She carries nothing that could identify her as an agent of Cascadia LEC. Anything that could identify her to Brown could identify her to the quarry. Except, of course, the recognition phrase. Which Sanchez memorized with great irritation, having found it stupid.