Black Man (44 page)

Wide awake, jet-lagged to pieces even the syn didn’t seem able to fix, she sat in the window of the hotel room and stared out over the bay. COLIN privileges—top-floor suite, unobstructed views. The marching lights of the Bay Bridge led her gaze inexorably across to where Oakland’s own nighttime display glowed from the waterline and twinkled up into the hills.

Cheap fucking piece of shit.

Norton wanted to put out a citywide search and detain, but neither she nor Coyle was interested. They both knew damn well where Marsalis was, and the fact that he was technically absent without authorization was the least of it. Rovayo wasn’t answering her phone, and what that meant was punched onto the other Rim cop’s face like bruising from a street fight. Sevgi couldn’t be sure if Coyle and Rovayo had ever been an item as such, but they were partners and most of the time that ran deeper. Higher loyalty stakes—the people you accepted into your bed weren’t likely to have to save your life on any given day. Back with NYPD, Sevgi’d had her share of ill-advised co-worker liaisons, but she never, never crossed that particular line with anybody she partnered, not because she hadn’t occasionally been tempted, but because it would have been stupid. Like taking one of harbor patrol’s big powerboats into the shallow waters off some white sand tourist beach. You just knew that you were
going stick and tip.

Not like now, huh, Sev,
the syn sneered at her.
This one, you’ve got well under control, don’t you?

Deep water and an even keel all the way
.

Oh shut up.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, disconnected into the sprinkle-lit night, when someone started hammering on the door.

“Sevgi?”

She blinked. It was Norton’s voice, muffled through the soundproofing on the door, and slightly slurred.

They’d sat up in the hotel bar for a while earlier, barely touched drinks and not much to say. At least she’d thought the drinks were barely touched until, out of nowhere, he said to her quietly,
Just like cocaine, right. No evolved defenses, too much strain on your heart
. She stared back at him, aware that he’d nailed her somehow but unable to make exact rational sense of the words.
I don’t know what you’re thinking about, Tom,
she answered stiffly.
But
I’m
sitting here thinking about Helena Larsen and how we still haven’t caught the motherfucker who murdered her
. It was only halfway to a lie.

The promises she’d made to herself and the mutilated corpse back in June weighed heavily whenever she gave them headroom.

So she’d fled the bar, left Norton sitting there with a brief good night. Now it seemed he’d stayed for the long haul.

“Sev. You in there?”

She sighed and levered herself off the window shelf to the floor. Padded across to the door and opened it. Norton leaned on the door frame with one raised arm, not as drunk as she’d feared.

“Yeah, I’m in here,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He grinned. “This you are going to love. Coyle just called.”

“Yeah?” She turned away, left the door open. “Come on in. So what happened? He storm over to Rovayo’s place and drag Marsalis out of her bed?”

“No, not quite.” Norton followed her in, waited until she turned back to face him. He was still grinning.

She folded her arms.

“So?”

“So Rovayo and Marsalis stormed
Bulgakov’s Cat
this evening, bullied their way into Daskeen Azul’s offices, and made a mess. Someone took exception and came at Marsalis with a machete.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Now Rovayo’s called a RimSec lockdown on the whole raft, and Marsalis is somewhere down in the belly of the beast, chasing the machete artist because he thinks it’s all part of some grand conspiracy that’ll lead him to Merrin.”

“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I wish I were.”

“Well—where’s Coyle?”

“On his way here, now. He’s heading out to the party with a detachment of RimSec’s public order thugs in tow. I sort of insisted he stop by and pick us up.”

Sevgi grabbed her jacket off the bed and shouldered her way into it.

“Would have settled for him just fucking her,” she muttered, then suddenly remembered she was no longer alone.

Norton pretended not to hear.

In the bowels of
Bulgakov’s Cat,
Carl found a curious relief. There were at least no fucking stores down here.

His short-term memory spilled recall of endless smooth-floored covered thoroughfares and changing frontages in such volume that their individuality finally blurred into perceptible patterns of appeal. Clothing under glass, museum exhibit sober or in shout-out garish display, depending on the prey it was designed to hook. Little chunks and slices of hardware under soft gleaming lights. Food and drink laid out in holo-real impressionistic tumbles of plenty designed to imitate some ghost memory of a street market.

Psychochemicals blown up in holodisplay to sizes where pills and the molecules they were made of each started to resemble the fetishized pieces in the hardware shops. Services and intangibles sold with broad cinematic images that offered almost no intelligible connection with the product. Level after level after level of it, walkway after walkway, maze of corridors, of elevators and staircases, all bright and endless.

He tuned it out and chased the machete boy, as close as the sparse nighttime crowds would allow.

He’d long ago learned that when the untrained are chased, they look back a lot in the early stages of the pursuit, but rapidly gain confidence if no pursuer is readily apparent. He supposed it was evolved tendency—if the big predator doesn’t get you in the first few minutes, you’re probably clear. In any event, the trick was to hang back and let your quarry build up that confidence, then tighten up and follow until they take you where you want to go. It rarely failed.

Of course, he would have liked more cover. The late shoppers were a thin crowd and to make matters worse a typical Rim mix, which meant black or white faces were a lot less common than Asian or Hispanic. And the boy with the machete seemed curiously fixated on Carl’s skin color. That might just have been standard, antiquated race hate—the boy was after all from Jesusland and spouting religious gibberish to match, so anything was possible—but even if it wasn’t, machete boy would be looking back for a black face, and there weren’t that many in the crowd. Carl needed him to see a few, suffer the jolt-drop of terror and then the relief as he wrote the sighting off. The more times that happened, the more the boy’s adrenal response to a black face was going to decay, and the more he’d relax.

He hung back, he used the mirrored surfaces, the camera playback-and-display narcissism of the mall space, and he watched as his quarry’s frantic, spinning, backward staring run damped down to a slower, purposeful threading through the crowd. The full-body turns became frequent over-the-shoulder glances, and then not so frequent. Carl eased forward, keeping behind knots of shoppers and going bent-kneed where there was no one tall enough to give him cover.

Then the stores ran out.

They’d been dropping levels slowly but steadily, taking gleaming marbled stairways and the odd gleaming jewel-box elevator, all consistently downward. At first Carl thought they might be heading back to Daskeen Azul, but they’d already gone too low for that, and he didn’t think the boy had the skills or presence of mind to lay a double-back track. In the frontages, prices came down. Empty rental space began to interpose itself between the taken units. The holodisplays got ragged, the merchandise and the way it was sold took on an imitative quality, a not-quite-good copy of what the upper decks carried. The services on offer became less wholesome, or at least less smoothly packaged. killbitch available, he saw in cheap neon, wasn’t sure what it referred to, wasn’t sure he wanted to. Elsewhere, someone had spray-canned a huge empty rectangle on the glass front of an untenanted unit and filled it with the words buy consume die—artwork to follow. No one had cleaned it off.

The boy flickered left out of the flow of shoppers and took another staircase. This time it was a utilitarian unpolished metal affair, and no one else was using it. When Carl got to it, he could hear his quarry’s steps clattering down in the well.

Fuck.

He waited until the metallic footfalls stopped, then went down after them, trying to make as little noise as possible. At the bottom of the well, he found himself in a low-rent residential section, simple green security doors set in bleak gray corridor walls whose ragged graffiti scars were almost a relief. A steady thrum in the structure suggested heavy-duty engines somewhere close. The floor was dirty, stains and patches of dust that crunched underfoot, neat lines of detritus swept to the sides either by mechanical cleaning carts or possibly the residents themselves. Clear evidence, if he’d been in need of it, that the nanohygiene systems didn’t make it down here much. Nor, he supposed, did anyone else who didn’t either live here or know someone who did.

Which, of course, made it perfect for Merrin.

The corridor was deserted. Receding rows of closed doors and no sign of machete boy anywhere.

Branch corridors up ahead to left and right, the same story again when he reached them and peered down the dingy perspectives they offered. Meshed-up tension sagging slowly into the realization that his quarry had gone to ground. He held off the settling feeling as best he could, prowled down the left-hand branch passage, ears tuned past the engine thrum for the sound of voices or footsteps. Well aware—
I know, I fucking
know—that the doors would have security cameras and that each one he passed upped the risk of being spotted if his quarry was in one of the apartments behind, watching the screen.

He did it anyway. Maybe machete boy had gotten hold of another weapon and was up for another shot at killing the black man.

He found a zone plan screwed to a wall at the next intersection, studied it, got a sense of how the area was laid out. The wall next to the map offered the deadpan grafittoed legend: you are here i’m afraid—deal with it. He grinned despite himself and prowled back the way he’d come, aiming to start a proper search pattern. Something to do until RimSec got there in force. He’d have to hope the lockdown worked.

Behind him, the clank-punt of a door disengaging its locks. He spun about, combat crouch in the making when he saw the woman backing out of the open doorway. She wore nondescript coveralls, some logo he didn’t recognize, and had her corkscrew-unruly hair gathered up in a tight band. Mestiza complexion, unlit spliff tucked into the corner of her mouth. By the time she’d fully turned, he was casual again.

“Hey there.”

She appraised him with a head-to-foot look. “What’s the matter, you lost?”

“Next best thing.” He built her a smile. “I’m supposed to meet some guy down here works for Daskeen Azul, think either I’ve taken a wrong turn or he has.”

“That right?”

She was looking at the S(t)igma jacket, he realized. Maybe the corporation and what it did wasn’t standard knowledge out this far west, but unless you were immune to continental American news digests, it was hard to misunderstand the style of the jacket and the bright chevrons down the sleeve. He sighed.

“Chasing a job, you know,” he said, faking weariness. “Guy says he can maybe get me some hours.”

Another flickered assessment. She nodded and took the spliff out of her mouth, turned and gestured with it, back to the corner with the map. “See that right turn there. Take that, two blocks straight then one left.

Takes you through the bulkhead to starboard loading. Think Daskeen got a couple of berths there.

You’re not far out-probably just got the wrong stairwell down off Margarita thoroughfare.”

“Right.” He let the renewed pulsing of the mesh leak through as eagerness. “Hey, thanks a lot.”

“No problem. Here.” She handed him the spliff. “You get the work, celebrate on me.”

“Oh hey, you don’t have to do—”

“Take it, man.” She held it out until he did. “Think I’ve never been where you are now?”

“Thanks. Thank you. Look, I’d better—”

“Sure. Don’t want to be late for your job interview.”

He grinned and nodded, wheeled about, and stalked rapidly back to the corner. As soon as he rounded it, he broke into a flat run.

Who is this?”

“This is Guava Diamond. We are blown, Claw Control. Repeat, we are blown. Heaven-sent is endangered at best, fully exposed at worst. I don’t know what the fuck you’re playing at over there, but this is out of nowhere. We have no cover and no exit strategy I can guarantee. Request immediate extraction.”

The bulkhead was a lustrous nanofiber black, raw and shiny and as distinct from the gray walls of the residential section as his Hilton-bought shirt was from the inmate jacket he wore over it. Bright yellow markings delineated the access hatches. By the look of it, they could be simply coded shut at a molecular level, hinges and locks turning to an unbroken whole with the surface of the hatch. He passed through, stabbed suddenly with memories of Mars. It hit him that ever since he’d gotten down from the shopping levels, that was what this place brought to mind. Life on Mars. Right down to the camaraderie of the helpful mestiza, the freely offered spliff.

Don’t think you’re going to miss all this,
Sutherland had grinned at him.
But you will, soak. You wait and see
.

Beyond lay starboard loading.

He’d been on factory rafts a few times before this, but it was always easy to forget the scale of the things.

Looking over the rail of the gantry he’d stepped onto was like viewing some immense factory testing rank for cable cars. The loading space was a fifty-meter slope up from the ocean and a vast roof of the same nanofiber construction as the bulkhead, vaulted so high overhead it could almost have been the night sky.

Cut into this base, a dozen or more cable-crank slipways led up out of the water to the undersides of the perched docking sheds they served. The nanofiber cables shone in their channels like roped licorice, new and wet looking in the overhead blast of LCLS arcs. Poised at various points between the underbelly entrances of the sheds and the sea, heavy-duty cradles held a variety of seagoing vessels secure on their respective slipways. Latticed steel gantries and stairs ran up and down the sides of the slips for maintenance and clung to the outer edges of the dock facilities above. Cranes and pylons bristled off the sloping surface. Dotted figures scrambled about, and faint yells lofted back and forth across the cavern-cold air. Carl scanned the roofing of the sheds for the Daskeen Azul logo, found it on the sixth unit in line, and started to run.