The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (8 page)

“You sure?” she frowned, absent-mindedly taking a glass of red wine presented to her by one of her puppy dogs. “You already had to put up with that farce of a trial. Any fool could see you were only acting in self-defense.”

I dived into my drink to avoid answering. Claims of self-defense didn’t go so well when you had a big enough stack of bodies to fill an industrial freezer. Especially not when you were jacked up on Chroma, and trespassing at that.

Mayor White made me uneasy, and had done ever since she publicly threw her support in behind me before she was elected a couple of months ago. She used to be a hotshot defense lawyer, the kind who could sing and make the jury dance. She’d come to visit me in my cell, made me tell her my story. A couple of days later, my court-sponsored lawyer was gone and I had a slick, high-class defense lawyer working pro bono as my new legal counsel. It was no secret that the guy was an old colleague of Juliet White’s. Saved me from going bankrupt, but it made me cold inside. She was playing an angle, and I didn’t much like it.

“Oh, don’t go getting all shy on me, Franco,” she said, putting a heavy arm around my shoulders. “You should seize this chance. Do some networking. You’ve got more to offer this city than the rest of these bozos put together.”

The crowd parted around us like the goddamn Red Sea. “I dunno, Miss White, I was thinking of heading off soon. Gotta wash my hair, you know.” I paused. “Actually, now that you mention it, there is someone I heard might be around. You heard of these AISOR guys?”

“Ah.” She gave me a knowing look and tapped the side of her nose. “Looking for work, eh? Good man, good man.”

“Not work,” I said. “I just want to talk—”

If she heard me, she didn’t pay a lick of attention. Her arm steered me to a small group sitting around a table in the corner. All were human—come to think of it, I hadn’t seen a single Vei since I’d arrived. Most of the group were middle-aged and sagging in all the wrong places, but two of them drew my eye. A tiny man in gold-rimmed spectacles peered at me with a look like a hawk. He brought a glass to his lips—water, plain—and then wiped the dampness from his pencil mustache with a napkin. I knew at once he was important. Regular guys like me can’t pull off facial hair like that.

Next to him was an Asian woman, probably in her late twenties. She paid me no mind, but she had a smile for the mayor. Black hair ran in straight lines past her cream-colored face. She was no knockout like Vivian, but she had a kind of quiet, open beauty to her, like a wishing fountain in a park.

I was instantly on guard.

Mayor White forced me into a chair and slapped me on the back so hard one of the sandwiches nearly came back up. “I’m sure you all recognize this face, don’t you?” she asked the group. “He’s been on TV enough.”

Eight sets of eyes looked at me, and seven looked away again. Spectacles had a hell of a stare on him for such a little guy.

She turned to me. “Franco, let me introduce you.” She pointed at Spectacles. “Miles Franco, meet Jozef Kowalski.”

“CEO of AISOR,” I said, offering my hand. Amazing what you could find on the Internet. Well, amazing what Tania could find. Kowalski peered at my hand for a moment like a biologist studying some new specimen out of Limbus, then he took it. It wasn’t so much a grip as a whispering touch. I could’ve wrapped my thumb and little finger all the way round his wrist and had room to spare.

“Who’s this, Jozef? Got yourself a new woman?” Mayor White gestured to the dark-haired girl who finally seemed to have noticed me.

Kowalski loudly didn’t smile. “This is Zhi Lu, one of my most promising chemical analysts. She’s with me in a purely professional capacity.”

I didn’t doubt it. By the look of him he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman if he found himself alone with one. Hell, it’d been so long I was starting to forget, myself.

“Miles Franco,” I said.

She nodded. “I know.”

The other people at the table went back to their own discussions, hushed now. A few sent looks in my direction, and a pair of them walked away to find better company. I tried to see if my glass of Coke had any conversation tips for a man half the city considered a mass murderer. It didn’t, but the mayor stepped in to rescue me instead.

“Jozef’s been a huge help getting the city back on its feet,” she said. “This is what Bluegate needs. Business. Investors. Some inflow of capital to get the wheels turning again.”

Kowalski waved the compliments away. “We saw an opportunity. We’re not a charity organization.”

“Charity’s not what we need.” The mayor pointed her wine glass in my direction. “You’ve seen the effort AISOR’s put into rebuilding the infrastructure in central and the South Bay.”

“Uh, not really. I’ve been in…” I glanced at Zhi Lu and changed what I was going to say. “…indisposed. Anyway,” I said, “I was wondering something. Call me an idiot, but what does AISOR do exactly?”

“We’re involved in a number of industries, but our main focus here in Bluegate is the Tunneling sector.” His voice was pure corporate-speak, but it didn’t tell me much. “The world of Tunneling has changed, and there are all sorts of opportunities for a company like us.”

I frowned. “You’re talking about Limbus? You’ve got a way to make money from that place?”

He took a sip of his water and said nothing.

“Well, watch yourself,” I said. “Those critters are nasty.” I still had scars on my arm where a spider-dog had sunk his teeth into me. I downed the rest of my Coke, grimacing as the bubbles stung my throat. I glanced at Zhi Lu and found her studying me, her head cocked slightly to the side. She was wearing a red satin dress that showed just a hint of cleavage. I turned my gaze back to Kowalski before she could make me nervous. “Say, you guys don’t have anything to do with drugs, do you?”

He glanced at me and took a sip of water. “Drugs? Medicines, you mean?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Never mind.” Was he lying? I wanted to press him, but I couldn’t exactly be discreet here. Maybe if I ducked out for a while, I could tail him and get him alone. It was the best I could come up with, and besides, I was getting jumpy again. I left my empty glass on the table and stood up.

Mayor White grabbed my sleeve. “Where are you going, Franco?”

“To take a piss.”

She grinned and waved me away. “Be back in time for the speeches. After that the fundraisers will come out to try and empty your pockets, and you’ll want to be on your guard. Don’t let ’em get anything without a fight.”

I tipped an imaginary hat to Kowalski and the girl, said, “Nice meeting you,” and shoved my way back through the crowd.

My ear might be stuffed, but I could still smell the bullshit. Something about that guy made my gut do backflips and set off the alarms in my head. Maybe AISOR didn’t kill Claudia, but I’d bet my shoes they weren’t as sparkling clean as they wanted to appear. In this city, no one was.

I waited until I’d put enough suits between me and the table that I couldn’t be seen, then I went back to the bar and found the smiling girl. “Hit me again.”

“Coke?” she said.

“Good memory.” I drummed my fingers on the bar. Where to now? Maybe I could ask around, see if I could dig up any dirt on AISOR until I could get Kowalski by himself.

The idea made my head pound.
Good luck trying to fit in here
. The air was stifling despite the air conditioning, and the armpits of my shirt were soaked.

The bar girl passed me my Coke. I put on my nice guy face. “Is there somewhere I can get some air?”

She pointed. “The courtyard.”

None of the hotels I’d ever stayed in had a courtyard. Most would be lucky to have a swimming pool without a dead rat in it. I thanked the girl, shoved my free hand in my pocket, and made my way back through the press.

It was a relief to actually breathe again. The courtyard was as swanky as the rest of the place, filled with hanging plants and tile walkways. A few of the other suits had escaped out here, and one or two even risked becoming social pariahs by lighting cigarettes. I found a bench in the corner that had a view of the garden and took a load off. My feet thanked me. I was wearing Tania’s dad’s shoes, though I might as well have been walking barefoot on tacks.

The courtyard’s garden was so big I couldn’t see the far side of it in the dark. Trees and rose bushes stood in ordered rows alongside the lawn. A dense line of hedges and evergreens stood guard to my right. I let the earthy scent wash over me while I sipped my drink.

Something moved in the garden. Maybe someone got too drunk, went to spew in the bushes. No, this wasn’t that kind of party. The shadow moved again. Ice dripped down my spine. I stood up quickly. The shadow ducked behind a line of trees. Hell. Was someone watching me?

A hand touched my shoulder. My skeleton tried to jump out my nose. I spun, grabbed the wrist, and cocked my hand with the glass in it, ready to smash it in a goon’s face.

Only it wasn’t a goon I was looking at. I lowered my arm and hoped the dark covered the color in my cheeks. “Sorry, I…uh…didn’t hear you.”

Zhi Lu had taken a step back from me, but the fear in her face fell away a moment later. She looked much prettier when some asshole wasn’t about to sock her one. “I saw you out here,” she said. She had a hint of an accent. “I wanted to escape from the speeches.”

I glanced back toward the main hall. Someone’s voice was crackling over a bad speaker system. He must’ve made a joke, because a wave of polite laughter rolled out a moment later, then died like an old man in an empty room.

“Your boss was right about you being smart.” I shuffled on the spot. She was closer than I normally like people to be, close enough for me to smell her vanilla-scented perfume. And since she was a beautiful woman working for a company that might or might not be engaging in mass murder, I’d have preferred at least a couple of sheets of bullet-proof glass between us.

But she wasn’t going anywhere. I stood there like an idiot for another couple of seconds, then pointed to the bench. “Seat?”

She tucked the hem of her dress in around her legs and sat down, knees together. I sat next to her and glanced back at the garden. The shadow was gone. Hell, maybe it was never there to begin with, me being a madman and all. I put the glass of Coke against my forehead, hoping the condensation would calm me down.

“What happened to your ear?” she said.

“Cat got me.”

“A cat?”

I held my hands a couple of feet apart. “Big one. Fangs like razor blades.” I bared my teeth to show her.

She giggled, and it was like the sound of rain on a window. The knots in my muscles began to relax.

“So what does a chemical analyst do in a place like AISOR?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Nothing at the moment. I’m a field analyst, but we’re not going anywhere right now. Not since our lead Tunneler disappeared.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

She mimed a little explosion with her fingers. Her nails were painted red. “Poof.”

I took a drink of my Coke. Disappearing Tunnelers. And they said Bluegate had changed.

We sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Then: “Did you really do those things they accused you of?”

“Which things?” I said.

“Killing those gangsters.”

I took another long drink. Something shimmered in the corner of my vision.
No, no more hallucinations.

“Pretty much, yeah,” I said.

Another weak laugh came from the audience inside. We were the only ones still in the courtyard. I waited for Zhi to get scared and make an excuse to leave.

“This isn’t really my scene,” she said. “I make sixty grand a year if I’m lucky. It’s enough, but I don’t exactly have a trust fund. You want to go somewhere else?”

I’ve been hit with sucker punches that were less surprising. I gaped for a moment, trying to find the right gear for my brain. “Uh…”

“There’s a Mexican place a couple blocks down,” she said. “Margaritas and nachos until three a.m.”

I met her eyes. Ever get that feeling when you’re on top of a cliff, looking down at the jagged rocks below, and your chest tightens, and you know without a shadow of a doubt that you’re going to fall?

Yeah.

“Nachos, huh?”

EIGHT

Zhi Lu had good taste in nachos. We sat in a corner booth and shared a large plate, blocking out the sounds of the busy restaurant with our own conversation. She told me a little about work at AISOR, while I tried to deflect questions about what it was like to cross worlds. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of Tunneling. I just didn’t want to dwell on what I’d done with it last winter. I’d had enough of that, enough of the letters from screwed-up women seeking some danger in their life by trying to screw a mass murderer.

Zhi was different, though. She didn’t focus on the destruction and the Chroma and all that other stuff. She just asked me about Heaven, and about the old days when I got in good honest trouble. Slowly, the tension went out of my shoulders and I started to relax around her. Of course, that might have been the booze.

We started getting buzzed on tequila and margaritas—her idea, not mine. She could hold her liquor well. Within a couple of hours we were giggling together, our knees pressed together beneath the table, her hand touching my shoulder. Her scent was making me feel things I hadn’t felt in months. So around two a.m. I finished off my margarita and said, “Hey, so, hey, you want to get out of here, or something?”

And she took my hand and we caught a cab and we went back to Zhi’s place. And we kind of slept together.

I’m not that kind of guy, I’m really not. I don’t think she was that kind of girl either. But it had been a long time for me. A really long time. I’m pretty sure mammoths were still around the last time I was with a girl. And right then, I didn’t think I could stop myself.

She was stronger than she looked. Her fingers traced my bruises as she sat atop me, her face glowing, her naked body glistening with sweat. My palms tightened around her narrow hips as she rocked back and forth. Heat radiated from her. In that moment, all the ghosts, all the guilt drained away, and it was just me and her and the night.