Black Man (54 page)

“Enough to make a case?” He thought she smiled in the dimness. “No. But you remember I told you someone in the department tipped Ethan off that they were coming for him?”

“Yeah, you said a downtown number.”

“Yeah.” She was smiling, bleakly. “Datacrime is downtown. I talked to a Datacrime sergeant said Amy Westhoff was acting weird all that day. Upset about something, in and out of the office all the time. The call went out from another floor in the building, an empty office up on fifth, but she could have gotten there easily enough.”

“Could have. You said he had a lot of friends in Datacrime.”

“No one knew about the SWAT deployment. No one except whoever it was that tipped them off in the first place.”

“Did Ethan have any friends in the SWAT chain of command? Or in City Hall, maybe?”

“Sure, and they waited until the morning it was due to go down before they called. And they went all the way across the city to do it, to a downtown NYPD precinct house and a fifth-floor office that they just happened to know would be empty. Come on, Carl. Give me a fucking break.”

“And no one else picked up on this?”

Another weak smile. “No one wanted to. First off, it’s not a crime to turn in a thirteen to the authorities.

You still see screen ads encouraging good citizens to do exactly that, every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. And then there’s the fact that Ethan was a cop, and to all appearances it looks like another cop ratted him out. That’s the kind of thing most people in the department would rather just forget ever happened.”

He nodded. He thought it might be starting to get light outside.

“So you planned to kill her. Have her killed. What stopped you?”

“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. Voice small and weary with the effort she’d been making. “In the end, I couldn’t make myself go through with it, you know. I’ve killed people in the line of duty, had to, to stay alive myself. But this is different. It’s cold. You’ve got to be so fucking cold.”

Beyond the window, the night was definitely beginning to bleach out. Carl saw Sevgi’s face more clearly now, saw the desolation in it. He leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead.

“Try to get some rest now,” he said.

“I couldn’t,” she muttered, as if trying to explain herself before a judge, or maybe to Ethan Conrad. “I just couldn’t do it.”

Rovayo showed up, off duty, with flowers. Sevgi was barely polite. The jokes she made about casual fucking, in a hoarse whisper of a voice, weren’t funny, and no one laughed. Rovayo toughed it out, spent the time there she’d announced she could, promised awkwardly to return. The look in Sevgi’s eyes suggested she didn’t much care one way or the other. Outside in the corridor afterward, the Rim cop grimaced at Carl.

“Bad idea, huh?”

“It was a nice thought.” He sought other matters, shielding from the coming truth behind the door at their backs. “You get anything from the crime scene?”

Rovayo shook her head. “Nothing that doesn’t belong to you, the dead guys, or a dozen irrelevant Bayview lowlifes. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.”

“Yeah, he was.” Carl brought recall to life, surprised himself with the stab of fury that accompanied the man’s half-familiar face. “You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.”

“Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s why we caught him so easily.”

Rovayo blinked. “I see you’re in a great mood.”

“Sorry. Haven’t had much sleep.” He glanced back at the closed door of Sevgi’s room. “You want to get a coffee downstairs?”

“Sure.”

Across the scarred plastic tabletop from her in the cafeteria downstairs, he asked mechanically after the
Bulgakov’s Cat
bust. There wasn’t much. Daskeen Azul weren’t shifting from their position. Merrin, Ren, and the others were employees who had usurped company policy and practice for their own illicit ends.

Any attempt to incriminate owners or management would be fought right into court and out the other side. Warrants resisted, bail set and paid, legal battle joined.

“And we’ll probably lose” was Rovayo’s sour assessment. “Same day we made the arrests, some very heavy legal muscle showed up from the Freeport. Tsai’s going to take them on anyway, he’s pissed about the whole thing. But no one’s talking, they’re all either too scared or too confident. Unless someone in this crew rolls over for us, and fast, we’re going to end up dead in the water.”

“Right.” It came out slack. He couldn’t make himself care.

Rovayo sipped her coffee, eyed him grimly across the table, and said: “I’m only going to ask this once, because I know it’s stupid. But are they sure they can’t beat this thing she’s got?”

“Yeah, they’re sure. The viral shift moves too fast, we’re just playing catch-up. There isn’t an n-djinn built that has the chaos-modeling capacity to beat this. Haag system’s designed to take down a thirteen, and my immune system’s about twice as efficient as yours, so they had to come up with something pretty unstoppable.”

Rovayo grunted. “Nothing ever fucking changes, huh?”

“Sorry?”

“Arms industry, making a living scaring us all. You know a couple of hundred years ago, they built a whole new type of bullet because they thought ordinary slugs wouldn’t take down a black man with cocaine in his blood?”

“Black man?”

“Yeah, black. Black-skinned, like you and me. First they tie cocaine use to the black community, make it a race-based issue. Then they reckon they need a bigger bang to put us down, because we’re all coked up.” The Rim cop made an ironic gesture of presentation. “Welcome to the .357 magnum round.”

Carl frowned. The terminology was only vaguely familiar. “You’re talking about some Jesusland thing, right?”

“Wasn’t called Jesusland then. This is a cased round I’m talking about. Two hundred years ago, I did say.”

He nodded and rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, sorry. You did. I forgot.”

“Same thing happened another couple of hundred years before that. Automatic fire this time.” Rovayo sipped at her coffee. “Guy called Puckle patented a crank-action mounted machine gun designed to fire square bullets at the advancing Turkish hordes.”

Carl sat back. “You’re winding me up.”

“No. Thing was supposed to fire round bullets if you were fighting Christians, square if you were killing heathens.”

“Come on! There’s no fucking way they could build something like that back then.”

“No, of course they couldn’t. It didn’t work.” The Rim cop’s voice tinged grim. “But the .357 magnum did. And so does Haag.”

“Monsters, huh,” said Carl quietly. “How come you know all this stuff, Rovayo?”

“I read a lot of history,” said the black woman. “Way I see it, you don’t know anything about the past, you got no future.”

They aspirate her lungs, try to bring her breathing back up. She just lies there while they do it, before, during, and after, puddled on the bed in her own lack of strength. The whole process feels like the kicks of a midterm pregnancy, but higher up and much more frequent, as if in tiny, hysterical rage
.

Memory brings tears, but they leak out of her eyes so slowly she runs out of actual feeling before they stop. She doesn’t have a lot of fluid to spare.

Her mouth is parched. Her skin is papery dry.

Her hands and feet feel swollen and increasingly numb.

When the endorphins they give her wear thin, she can track the passage of her urine by the tiny scraping pains it makes on its way to the catheter.

Her stomach aches from emptiness. She feels sick to its pit.

When the endorphins come on, it feels like going back to the garden, or the nighttime ride of the ferries across the Bosphorus to the Asian side. Black water and merry city lights. She hallucinates once, very clearly, coming into the dock at Kadiköy and seeing Marsalis waiting for her there. Dark and quiet under the LCLS overheads.

Reaching out his hand.

Surfacing from the dosage is pain, dragging her back like rusty wires, and sudden, sick-making fear as she remembers where she is. Lying drained, and seeping slowly in and out of bags. Stale sheets and the gaunt sentinels of the machines around her. And through it all, a racking, overarching, frustrated fury with the body she’s still wired and tied and bedded down into.

He tried to work.

Sevgi was out on the swells of endorphin a lot of the time, drifting there in something that approximated peace. He found he could step out and leave her in these periods, and he conversed with Norton in low tones, sitting in waiting rooms, or leaned against walls in the night-quiet hospital corridors.

“I remembered something this afternoon,” he told the COLIN exec. “Sitting in there, shit going through my head. When Sevgi and I went to talk to Manco Bambarén, he recognized this jacket.”

Norton peered at the arm Carl held out to him, the orange chevrons flashing along the sleeve.

“Yeah? Standard Republican jail wear, I guess any criminal in the Western Hemisphere’s got to know what that looks like.”

“It’s not quite standard.” Carl twisted to show Norton the lettering on the back. The COLIN exec shrugged.

“Sigma. Right. You know how many prison contracts those guys have in Jesusland? They’ve got to be the second or third biggest corporate player the incarceration industry has. They’re even bidding on stuff out here on the coast these days.”

“Yeah, but Manco told me he had a cousin who did time specifically in South Florida State. Now, maybe we can’t hack the datafog around Isabela Gayoso so easily, but we ought to be able to chase prison records and maybe dig this guy up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can use.”

Norton nodded and rubbed at his eyes. “All right, we can look. God knows I could use the distraction right now. You get a name?”

“No. Bambarén, maybe, but I doubt it. The way Manco was talking, this wasn’t anyone that close to home.”

“And we don’t know when he did time?”

“No, but I’d guess recently. Sigma haven’t held the SFS contract more than five or six years max. Sigma jacket, you’ve got to be looking at that time frame.”

“Or Bambarén misremembered, and his cousin did time in some other Sigma joint, somewhere else in the Republic.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Manco Bambarén’s memory. Those guys aren’t big on forgive and forget, especially not when it’s down to family.”

“All right, leave it with me.” Norton glanced back down the corridor toward Sevgi’s room. “Listen, I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you stay with her?”

“Sure. That’s why I’m here.”

Norton’s gaze tightened on his face. “You call me if anything—”

“Yeah. I’ll call you. Go get some rest.”

For just a moment, something indefinable passed between the two of them in the dimly lit width of the corridor. Then Norton nodded, clamped his mouth tight, and headed away down the corridor.

Carl watched him go with folded arms.

Later, sitting by her bed in the bluish gloom of the night-lights, flanked by the quiet machines, he thought he felt Elena Aguirre slip silently into the room behind him. He didn’t turn around. He went on watching Sevgi’s sallow, washed-out face on the pillow, the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing beneath the sheet. Now he thought Aguirre was probably close enough to put a cool hand on the back of his neck.

“Wondered when you’d show up,” he said quietly.

Sevgi washed awake, alone, left beached by the receding tide of the endorphins, and she knew with an odd clarity that it was time. The once vertiginous terror was gone, had collapsed in on itself for lack of energy to sustain it. She was, finally, more weary, more miserably angry, and more in pain than she was scared.

It was what she’d been waiting for.

Time to go.

Outside the window of her room, morning was trying to get in. Soft slant of sunlight through the gap in the quaint hand-pull curtains. Waiting between endorphin surges for night to drag itself out the door had seemed like an aching, gritty forever. She lay there for a while longer, watching the hot patch of light creep onto the bed at her feet and thinking, because she wanted to be sure.

When the door opened and Carl Marsalis stepped into the room, the decision was as solid in her head as it had been when she woke.

“Hi there,” he said softly. “Just been up the hall for a shower.”

“Lucky fucking bastard,” she said throatily, and was dismayed at how deep, how bitter her envy of that simple pleasure really was. It made her feelings over Rovayo look trivial by comparison.

Time to go.

He smiled at her, maybe hadn’t caught the edge in her voice, maybe had and let it go.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked.

The same question he asked every time. She held his gaze and mustered a firm nod.

“Yeah, you can. Call my father and Tom in here, will you?”

The smile flickered and blew out on his face. He stood absolutely still for a moment, looking down at her.

Then he nodded and slipped out.

As soon as he was gone, her pulse began to pound, up through her throat and in her temples. It felt like the first couple of times she ever had to draw her weapon as a patrol officer, the sudden, tilting comprehension that came with a street situation about to go bad. The terror of the last decaying seconds, the taste of irrevocable commitment.

But by the time he came back with the other two, she had it locked down.

“I’ve had enough,” she told them, voice a dried-up whisper scarcely louder in the room than it was in her own head. “This is it.”

None of them spoke. It wasn’t like this was a surprise.

“Baba, I know you’d do this for me if you could. Tom, I know you would, too. I chose Carl because he can, that’s all.”

She swallowed painfully. Waited for the ache it made to subside. Hiss-click of the machines around her across the silence. Outside in the corridor, the hospital’s working day was just getting under way.

“They’ve told me they can keep me going like this for at least another month. Baba, is that true?”

Murat bowed his head. He made a trapped sound, somewhere between throat and chest. He jerked a nod. Tears fell off his eyes onto the sheets. She found suddenly, oddly, that she felt worse for him than she did for herself. Abruptly, she realized that the fear in her was almost gone, squeezed out of the frame with pain and tiredness and straightforward irritation with it all.

Time to go.

“I’m not going to go on like this for another month,” she husked. “I’m bored, I’m sick, and I’m tired. Carl, I told you this felt like a wall rushing at me?”

Carl nodded.

“Well, it isn’t rushing anymore. It’s all slowed down to sludge. I’m sitting here looking at where I have to go, and it looks like fucking kilometers of hard ground to crawl on my hands and fucking knees. I won’t do that. I don’t want to play this fucking game anymore.”

“Sev, are you—” Norton stalled out.

She smiled for him. “Yeah, I’m sure. Been thinking it through for long enough. I’m tired, Tom. I’m tired of spending half my time stoned, and the other half waking up in pain to realize I’m still not fucking dead, that I’ve still got that part to go. It’s time to just get on with it, just get it done.”

She turned to Carl again.

“Have you got it?”

He took out the slippery white packet and held it out to her. Light from the brightening morning outside came in and glimmered on the slick plastic covering. Letting go of the light was going to be the hardest thing. Sunlight broke in and danced about the room when they pulled the curtains each morning, and it was almost worth not quite being dead each morning because of it. It was what she clung to as she rode the long troughs and swells of dreaming and back-to-real every night. She’d hung on this long because of it. Might even have hung on a little longer, a few more mornings, if she wasn’t so
fucking
weary.

“Baba.” Her voice was tiny, she had to struggle to keep it even. “Is this going to hurt me?”

Murat cleared his throat wetly. He shook his head.

“No,
canim
. It’ll be like.” He gritted his teeth to keep from sobbing. “Like going to sleep.”

“That’s good,” she whispered breathlessly. “I could use some decent sleep.”

She found Carl with her eyes. She nodded, and watched him tear open the package. His hands moved efficiently, laying out the component parts of the kit. He barely seemed aware of the actions—she guessed he’d done similar on enough battlefields in the past. She glanced across to Tom Norton, found him weeping.

“Tom,” she said gently. “Come here and hold my hand. Baba, you come ’round here. Don’t cry, Baba.

Please don’t cry, any of you. You’ve got to be happy I’m not going to hurt anymore.”

She looked at Carl. No tears. His face was black stone as he prepped the spike, held it up one-handed to the light, while his other hand touched warm and callus-fingered on the crook of her arm. He met her eyes and nodded.

“You just tell me when,” he said.

She looked around at their faces once more. Made them a smile each, squeezed their hands. Then she found his face again, and clung to it.

“I’m ready,” she whispered.

He bent over her. Tiny, cold spike into her arm, held there a moment by the overlaying warmth of his fingers, and then gone. He swabbed, applied something cool, and pressed down. She arched her neck to get closer to him, brushed her paper-dry lips across the rasp of his unshaven cheek. Breathed in his scent and lay back as the beautiful, aching warmth spread through her body, inking out the pain.

Waited for what came next.

Sunlight outside.

She wanted to look sideways at the slanting angle it made, but she was just too sleepy now to make the effort. Like her eyes just wouldn’t move in their sockets anymore. It felt like a weekend from her youth in Queens,
crawling into bed Sunday morning just past dawn, weary from the long night out clubbing across the river. Taxi home, girlish hilarity leaching out to a reflective comedown quiet as they cruised through silent streets, dropping off along the way. Creeping up to the house, scrape of the recog fob across the lock, and of course there’s Murat in pajamas, already up and in the kitchen, trying to look scandalized and failing dismally. She grins her impish grin, steals white cheese crumbs and an olive off his plate, a sip of tea from his glass. His hand cuffs through her hair, tousles it, and tugs her head gently into an embrace. Bear-hug squeeze, and his smell, the rasp of his stubble across her cheek. Then, climbing the stairs to her room,
yawning cavernously, almost tripping over her own feet. She pauses at the top, looks back, and he’s standing there at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with so much pride and love in his face that out of nowhere it shunts aside the comedown weariness and makes her heart ache like a fresh cut
.

“Better get some sleep, Sevgi.”

Still aching as she stumbles into bed, still half dressed. Curtains not properly drawn, sunlight slanting in, but no fucking way that’s going to stop her sleeping, the way she feels now. No fucking way…

Sunlight outside.

Aches and pains forgotten. The long, warming slide into not worrying about anything at all.

And the room and all that was in it went away gently, like Murat closing her bedroom door.