Authors: Finder
"I vaguely remember that." I shifted a little on the stair tread.
"I always figured from your name that you'd be, you know, not a round-eye. No offense."
"No offense. It's the other meaning of 'orient,' as in, 'to find a direction.'"
She smiled, a strangely acute and piercing expression. "Have you found one?" she asked.
"Yes." I said. "Yes, I have."
Rico came out of the apartment then. "Linn says there's nothing fancy in the note—paper, ink, and no due about the writer. Would you mind doing your thing, here, and seeing if there's anything you can pick up?"
Kathy Hong looked first at Rico, men at me as I stood up. Her eyebrows were raised; the corners of her mouth were raised and compressed as if something about the scene at the top of the stairs was terribly funny.
Yes, I have found a direction. Yes
. From out of the empty spot in my chest, I said, "It's twenty-five bucks a day, or the equivalent, in currency or trade goods. Thirty in credit. And I don't charge you for days you don't use me."
There was no reading Rico's expression. "That's fair," she said at last.
I pulled off the hard hat, handed it to Kathy Hong, and combed my fingers once through my hair. "Let's see the note."
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Sometimes it seems as if any trick will work once, in the Borderlands. Unfortunately, there are so many times when you can't make them work again. "Where does this belong?" seemed to be one of those. The piece of paper in Rico's hand sat like a—well, like a piece of paper, and didn't tell me anything more than what was written on it. I even took it from her and held it, though contact had never made any difference before.
In daylight, it had more character. It was a thick sheet, the surface not perfectly smooth, with one thin
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and ragged edge. B
etween the creases and dirt from last night's mistreatment I could see threa
ds, hairs
really, of red and blue, that seemed to be part of
the paper. And the writing, of course. It was still densely black; none of those perfectly-made letters had smeared or scuffed. Very crisp, clear, careful.
And inert. If this piece of paper belonged anywhere that it knew about, it wasn't talking. I wandered across the landing and leaned on the stair rail. It quivered ominously, so I gave that up.
The direct approach? Not to be scorned. I fingered the paper and wondered where the person was who'd written on it. Nothing, nothing.
Rico cleared her throat behind me and said, "Progress report?"
"Garbage in, garbage out. I warned you. This is a little subjective."
"Could have fooled me. What's subjective about where a piece of paper came from?"
I wondered if she could tell from my face that she'd just made me feel a right idiot. I shouldn't have been embarrassed; "Where did this come from?" could have been the wrong question just as easily as any of the ones I'd already asked. It wasn't, though.
"Thataway," I said.
"Oh, goodie. Let's go there."
"Criminy. I might have a fix on a paper mill," I warned her.
"Very true. Don't you want to know?"
"I don't have a lot of choice now. Silken cord goes yank, yank. It's a compulsion."
"And it might not be a paper mill. It might be a nice box of stationery in someone's desk drawer, and I would be one happy copper. Wouldn't you like that?" She clattered down the stairs without regard to their structural integrity.
Kathy Hong looked after her and said cheerfully, "Two spokes."
"Oy," I replied, and followed Rico out into the sun.
My guidance system was suggesting we head uphill. It was too soon to tell if it wanted us to go Up Hill.
I let Rico's idea of how to leave the curb press me back into the bucket seat and said, "So your father was a cop?"
I got a sidelong glance from Rico that wasn't quite long enough to affect our trajectory. Eventually she said, "I take it Ms. Hong is a busybody."
"Is it supposed to be a secret?"
A moment's pause. "No."
"Did he just make it look like fun? Why did you become a cop, too?"
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"I don't suppose it's occurred to you that it's none of your
business?"
"Just making small talk," I said, while realizing that this was, maybe, not the smallest subject in the world, after all.
"I had a teddy bear in a policeman's uniform. It affected me deeply."
Something about the voice she'd said that in suggested that she didn't want to hear so much as an "Oh"
out of me. But silence didn't seem like the right response, either. "Oh," I said.
Rico braked hard and pulled the Spitfire to the side of the road, which made the motorcyclist behind us yell something as he gunned past. I saw my face twice in her sunglasses as she said, "I didn't ask you about your childhood."
"Only once."
"I apologized."
I felt like slime—not all at once, but with a steadily growing conviction as I thought back over the last few minutes. "That's a fact," I said at last. "I'm sorry. Try turning right at the next street."
Right was good; in fact, all of my directions were good, which was the only good thing in the car for about a quarter of an hour. In that time, we drove out the side of the city proper, into a formerly residential tangle of streets that were too close to the Border to survive untouched when Faerie came back. Most of the neatly gridded lots had gone back to wilderness. A few still held the ruins of ramblers and two-story Colonials, the kind of houses I could tell you the floor plans of without ever going inside.
And there were, occasionally, structures that had been changed by whatever non-human agency turned off the lights periodically even now in Bordertown. I saw a tower, bent over like an old woman,
wrapped in mauled vinyl siding and topped with the remains of asphalt shingles. One house seemed to be in perfect condition, if you can say that about a house that appeared to have been turned inside out like a T-shirt in the laundry. Its exterior materials were compacted in a tidy cube from which all its rooms radiated. The chenille bedspread in the master bedroom was white, unmarked, and smooth.
"I hate neighborhoods like this," Rico said suddenly, breaking our long silence. I jumped because of that, and because I'd been thinking the same thing.
"Too weird?" I tried to keep my voice perfectly neutral.
"Not weird enough. Is it much further?"
Did that mean that she hated them as I did, for the memories they evoked? I'd never lived here; but I'd lived in that place just like it that existed in every North American town, all those places named for trees that had never grown there, for features the terrain had never had. Maybe Rico had lived there, too. That would mean we had a lot to say to each other, or nothing at all. "I can never really tell how far. Just direction. Make this left."
She did. It was a dead end, but that was all right; I knew we were there. Something had been
grandfathered into the zoning here, to allow for the neat little farm that had once occupied the end of the street. Now all that stood was the barn, set far back from the road, its white paint nearly gone, and a scramble of weathered board fence. The "KEEP OUT!" painted on the barrier across the overgrown
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drive was
more recent.
"Ping," I said. "You Are Here."
"Can't argue with that," Rico replied. Her voice had changed. It was familiar, though, a peculiar intense calm, and I remembered it suddenly from last night, when we'd arrived at the derelict apartment
building. I looked, and found she had her revolver in her hand, broken open to check the chambers. To judge from her face, she'd never had an emotion in her life.
"Is this going to be dangerous?"
The sunglasses swivelled to reflect me again. "We hope not."
"Damn straight we do."
"Do you know how to drive a stick?"
"What? What does that—"
"If you don't get a signal from me one way or another in fifteen minutes, or if someone comes out of there who isn't me, drive back to Chrystoble Street and tell 'em what happened, where I am." She had a shoulder holster in her lap, with her copper card fastened to it. She shrugged into it as I watched.
In other words, I was supposed to stay in the car. I should have been relieved, and I was, really I was. I was also offended. I resolved to ignore that.
I watched her go, bent low and moving quickly along the fence line. Her gray tank top and faded fatigue pants blended pretty well with the scenery. There was a row of trees behind the barn that I thought she might be making for. The trees weren't evenly spaced, or all the same age; they looked as if they were growing there because they felt like it, and not because someone had planted them. Trees sprouted up like that beside creeks and riverbeds.
The sun drilled down on me, and I wished Rico's taste hadn't run to convertibles. Of course I could drive a stick. Though she wouldn't know that from her police report, that the damned enormous Chrysler had had a manual transmission. I remembered the awful grinding sound when I tried to yank it into reverse too fast, in the tight space between the ditches, and the way the tall grass had stood colorless and shivering in the headlight glare.
At the barn door, something moved, and slapped me back into the present. I flinched; then I saw it was Rico. My heart banged away in my chest anyway. She made a quick, short gesture with one hand that I finally figured out was "come here." I thought for an instant about traps, before I realized how stupid that was, and climbed out of the car and over the barrier.
Halfway there I smelled it, and thought of wet laundry. Steam and starch and a whiff of bleach. There was a steady thumping sound coming from inside, and an odd mid-range hum, and a sudden clang of
metal. I came up to Rico with my eyebrows raised. She just nodded me in the door, her face impassive.
I was sun-dazzled, even after I took my shades off, and it took me a moment to register what was being done in the barn. Then I murmured to Rico, "I win."
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"Close only counts
in horseshoes," she answered. She had taken off her sunglasses, too.
"What do you mean? It's a paper mill."
"Don't tell that to him," Rico said, jerking her head at the figure coming toward us.
He was very large. Not just tall, but with shoulders big even in proportion to his height, and with great thick arms poking out of his T-shirt. His hair was thick and black, and even damp went every which way; his eyebrows formed a single unpruned hedge across the field of his forehead; his moustache
bristled further forward than his nose; and his beard seemed to continue over his throat, down the neck of his shirt, and out the armholes to his wrists. Beneath the hair, his exposed skin was apple-red. For a moment I wondered if he'd dyed it. Then I remembered the big vat behind him with its cumulus cloud of steam, and realized he was just lightly parboiled. His T-shirt read, "Art doesn't kill. Artists do." He was scowling at us.