Authors: Finder
I wanted to reply in kind, but my accent is terrible. I looked her in the eye and nodded, and saw that she understood.
Downstairs, the artist was up and working on the tapestry. It was Luigi, Weegee for short, a halfie who
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lived on the first fl
oor.
"Morning, Weegee. How's Clarice?"
He grinned, showing the gap where one of his upper front teeth was missing. "Cool. We're back together."
"Congratulations." Since Weegee and Clarice broke up about once every seventy-two hours, sometimes for as much as a whole day, I didn't feel bad about not knowing they'd done it this time.
He finished a row of the tapestry, and pressed the new work up tight against the old with his hands. One thin lock of his carrot-colored hair swung braided in front of his right ear. He was wearing cut-offs and a pair of leather work gloves, and seeing the film of sweat on his white skin and the bunching and rolling of his shoulder muscles, I realized the weight of the rope he was working with, and how much effort it was to push and pull it through the weave.
"Looks good," I said, inadequately.
"Uh? Oh, thanks."
"What's it about?"
"This? It's 'The Death of Young Andrew.' "
"I don't know that one."
"No?" He squinted at me thoughtfully. "D'you like movies?"
"Yeah."
"Well, it's kinda the Brian De Palma flick of ballads. Great betrayal and vengeance stuff. And generation versus generation, too, 'cause this girl's father lets her die 'cause his pride is wounded, but her brothers avenge her. Anyway, they leave this guy Andrew with his arms and legs broken and Dad's gold in his lap and tell him he can count the money 'til the wolves come for him. It's great."
"Yum," I agreed. "How much longer 'til it's finished?"
"Couple days. The weaving goes pretty fast, but I haveta find some stuff for the edging. Like, I want to get a skull. Human or elf, doesn't matter."
"In this town, it's either easy or impossible. Good luck." I settled my sunglasses on my nose and went out into the sullen heat of midday.
When I got to my building, the Spitfire was in front of it. I could see the top of Rico's head past the driver's side seatback, and both her feet, crossed at the ankles, propped on the passenger's side door.
When I came closer, I saw that she was lying with her arms crossed, and that she'd substituted very dark shades for the Night Peepers. I couldn't tell if her eyes were closed, which I suppose was part of the point. She looked pretty comfortable for someone trying to nap sitting sideways in two bucket seats.
She was wearing a gray tank top, and I still couldn't see any tan lines. There were freckles on her collar
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bone. I
t suddenly occurred to me that cops tan by the same method the res
t of us use—by lying in the
sun w
ith little or no clothing on—and it was as if all of reality shifted an eighth of an inch to one si
de
and snapped back. I swallowed the lump in my throat before I spoke. "I'm surprised you didn't just wait in my apartment."
Her mouth twitched. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was housebreaking without a warrant. I'll never do it again. Any more baggage?"
"Baggage?"
"It's too hot to snipe at each other."
I stood on the sidewalk staring down at her. Last night Sunny Rico had been a tough, driven cop in a sleek, strange car, with a grip on the scruff of my neck. Now she was… still that. But her smile was relaxed, her body loose, and her damned car showed its age with the glamour of darkness off it.
"You're off duty," I hazarded.
Rico slid the sunglasses down her nose and frowned at me over them. "How did you know?"
"If I told you, you'd be annoyed. What are you doing here if you're off duty?"
"I feel a strong urge to say, 'If I told you, you'd be annoyed.' I may be off duty, but Linn isn't. And Linn's combing over last night's apartment building even as we speak. I don't know about you, but I'm crazy to find out what he's found out."
"Huh." I tried to look nonchalant. But after telling the Ticker about the night's adventures, and hearing her speculations about the mechanics of dropping ceilings with magic, I actually did want to know.
"You should put on a pair of pants, though."
You better not be blushing
, I warned myself. "I'm wearing pants."
"No, you're not. You're wearing the oldest pair of cutoffs in the known universe. If I'm seen in public with you, people will think I've gone back to living on the street."
"Jeez, nobody likes the way I dress this morning." I left her waiting in the car and went upstairs to put on jeans. I did it because I wasn't sure where we were going or how long we'd be there. It had, I was certain, nothing to do with how cops get tans.
We laid a little rubber leaving the curb; Rico drove like a reckless motorcyclist, which caused me to wonder what she'd driven before she'd dedicated her free time to the Spitfire. As the dusty trees of Liberation Row flicked by, she asked, "What's the going rate, anyway? I said I'd pay you for this."
"It's usually by the job. I'm beginning to think I ought to charge by the hour for this one."
"By the day, anyway. Why can't I just ask you to find the guy responsible for making and distributing this shit?"
"I don't know. It just doesn't work that way."
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"What way
does
it work?"
I shrugged. "I don't—I'm not sure," I finished, since no matter how stupid this line of questioning made me feel, at least I didn't have to repeat myself. "I know there's a certain amount of… specificity involved. I mean, you don't know if the one you're looking for is male or female or human or elf or halfie. You don't even know if you're looking for one person or a whole crew. How do you know the person who makes it is the same one who distributes it? One of us, at least, has to know what we're asking me to find."
"But once it works, it's guaranteed?"
I spent a city block rolling my answer around in my mouth, deciding whether I was going to say
something I'd suspected for a while, but hadn't quite wanted to hear out loud. It seemed like the right time. "I think I'm sort of like a polygraph. I think there's an illusion of—there's a word I want—lack of bias, objectivity, I guess—that isn't necessarily there if the thing I'm looking for is a little…" I shrugged.
"… Subjective."
Rico gave me a sideways look from behind her sunglasses. "Uh. Give me some help here. Got an example?"
"Yeah. In the end, when we were trying to figure out who was the real, no-shit mastermind behind the murder at Danceland, Wolfboy asked me to find the person who met two different sets of qualifications, because he knew that the person who met both was the one behind the killing. So I found that person.
But Wolfboy was already pretty sure she had done it; he was just looking for confirmation. Did I find the person who fit the specs, without bias? Or did I just locate the person that Wolfboy had in mind?"
"In that particular case, it was the same thing," Rico reminded me, but she said it slowly, as if examining my theory as she spoke.
"Yeah. I was lucky that time, wasn't I?"
We took a corner as if Rico expected the car to be hinged in the middle. "You're telling me you don't trust this gift of yours."
"I'm telling you it's not trustworthy. You should keep that in mind."
"Fine. I'll do that. Just don't let it screw you up."
I slid as far down in the passenger seat as the harness allowed—not far—and sighed. I don't think she could hear me.
She turned at last onto the street where we'd parked the night before, across from the apartment building.
Former apartment building. In the brassy light of midday, I couldn't imagine anyone having left the top floor under his own power. Certainly not me. Then I remembered last night's storm, and realized that things like the spill of bricks into the street, casual as a drift of sand, might be new since I'd been here last.
Rico said something fierce and explosive that I didn't catch; then she seconded my thoughts. "Linn must have been biting the heads off nails. No telling how much the rain washed away last night."
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"The
n why wasn't he out here last night?"
Rico gave me a look. "Unless you want the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, don't say that to him."
She slung herself over the top of the door and strode across the street, and I followed her.
Linn met us on the sidewalk with no sign of rust stains on his teeth; if he was angry, it was some kind of incalculable emotion that I didn't know how to read. He wore a faded red sweatshirt with the bottom half and the sleeves lopped off, mud-stained jeans, and, twisted up and knotted around his waist but still recognizable, the official silver jacket.
"Such things as might have been here, the sky only knows," he said, making all the syllables crisp. His partner knew him pretty well, after all. "Sweet Nature herself wipes away this devil's tracks." There was a chalk line on the pavement in front of the ex-building; Linn stepped over it absently, like a kid who'd trained himself not to walk on sidewalk cracks. Rico did, too, just as I walked into the thing it delineated.
The sensation faded fast, but I said "Ow," anyway, and felt like a dog whose master has forgotten to hold the door for it.
"Your pardon," Linn said, on a note of genuine apology. He held both hands over the chalk line about a door's width apart, and spoke a sweet, ringing sentence. "You shall have passage now, anywhere along the line."
He led the way into the still-soggy front hall. All the doors to the apartment units stood open now, and several people in various quantities of silver were moving chunks of brick and second-storey floor joists and scraps of faded wallpaper and frowning over them. One woman with crisp black hair and long
almond eyes looked up at us and shouted, "Dammit, Linn, put hats on 'em!"
"They're ours," he told her.
"Never mind, then," she growled. "Nobody cares if the public servants get brained with a brick."
"Mind your footing on the stairs," Linn warned us. "We've bound what we can, but the Border is an unchancy place for knots."
Rico started up the stairs after him, but I lagged in the doorway and asked the black-haired woman,
"Don't the public servants themselves care?"
"Huh?"
"About being brained with a brick."
"Oh." The dust on her face cracked with her sudden grin. "But if we did anything about it, people might think we were scared of dying."
There was a scuffed yellow hard hat propped rakishly on the newel post. I put it on as I went up the stairs.
The sun was beating down in the apartment where Rico and I had found the note. On first look, I