Authors: Finder
from… That took less time to think about than it looks, but not much.
Hawthorn, thank Mab or whomever, smiled. He had really good teeth, and cross my heart and hope to die, laugh wrinkles around his eyes. Had I ever seen an elf with laugh wrinkles? "Captain Hawthorn, actually."
Well, there was my answer. "Captain. Sorry."
"No offense taken. I saw you here with Detective Rico—night before last, wasn't it? Did she introduce us?"
I certainly wasn't going to tell him that I remembered his name because Rico and I had talked about him behind his back. "No. I'm Orient." I stuck out my right hand, which is not something one usually does with elves, but I had the feeling it was appropriate with this one.
It was. He had a good firm handshake, which fit the role. Bingo—now he made sense. He might be older than most elves I knew, and have a more responsible job, but Hawthorn was as much a sucker for
playacting as any of them. Darn good at staying in character, too. Wolfboy would have asked him if he'd seen Robert Preston in
This Gun for Hire
.
"I think I've heard of you," he said. "You can find things for people, can't you?"
I nodded. "That's what I've been doing for Rico. I've got a fix on something right now that might be useful."
"I see. Failing Detective Rico, will I do?"
"Nicely." I explained to him about the dream, which took considerable backtracking; he was as surprised as Linn had been that I'd snagged a memory off a corpse, and wanted all the irrelevant details. Then I told him about the black-framed bike with the red teardrop tank. He stared over my shoulder, abstracted.
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"Sound familiar
?" I asked.
"Possibly. Possibly…"
I made a reflexive gesture toward the breast pocket of my T-shirt; then I remembered I hadn't put my smokes in it before I tore out of the apartment. My lighter was in my jeans pocket, but my cigarettes were on the windowsill at home. I made a little disgusted noise.
Hawthorn missed neither the gesture nor the sound. He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his inside breast pocket, shook one out for himself, and held out the pack.
"Herbal?"
He nodded. "Take a few to tide you over."
"Captain—is there an elven equivalent for a saint?" I took two, and put the extra in my T-shirt pocket.
Hawthorn smiled and lit for both of us. "I don't think so, but I understand the sentiment. You say you know where this bike is now?"
"Mmm. Thataway," I told him, with a swing of my head.
"It would help if you could be more specific." He sounded a little chilly, and I realized he thought I was withholding information.
"I can't be more specific. I only know direction, not location. I have to go out in person and find the sucker. If somebody here can go with me and do cop things when we get there, there might be
something useful in it."
Hawthorn sat with his long, bony chin on his hand, looking thoughtful. "There might, indeed," he said at last. "Unfortunately, Officer Saquash can't leave the dispatch desk, as I'm sure he told you. And I'd need approval to act outside my jurisdiction. I can get it, but it will take a few hours."
"The bike should keep. And even if somebody does move it between now and then, I'll be able to follow it."
"Well," Hawthorn said. He seemed impressed. "Well. Is this feeling of yours something that wears off?
Can you wait a little?"
I rubbed the bridge of my nose again, in reflex. "It wears off eventually, but eventually isn't for a while yet. In the meantime it's sort of uncomfortable. If you happen to have two aspirin and a pint of dark beer it would help a lot."
"Won't that—" He seemed to scramble for a phrase. "—make the feeling go away faster?"
"Won't matter if it does. I'll just find the bike again."
The door at the back of the room swung open to let Saquash in. He was balancing a bowl and a cup, both giving off steam. When he saw Hawthorn he stopped and stared. "Hullo, Captain. Didn't know you were still here."
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"I was working too hard to
make any noise, I'm afraid. What's that you've got?"
Saquash set his load down in front of me. "Food for the kid. He was starting to look fuzzy around the edges."
The food was vegetable soup, and the cup was full of genuine coffee. Well, I suppose if anybody knows where to get it when the rest of the town is short, it'll be the police.
I hope I didn't salivate visibly. I slid an ashtray over from the end of the table and snuffed my cig. "You didn't go out of your way for this, did you?"
"It was all we had left. We already ate the donuts. No, we keep a pot on pretty much all the time, for when we're too busy for breaks."
"Good grief. Thank you."
"No prob. If we run out, next shift can make their own damn lunch."
Hawthorn had watched the whole exchange closely, as if he were looking for tips on his intonation. "We can also manage some aspirin and a beer, I think. Can't we, Saquash?"
"Yes, sir. Beer's in the icebox, and aspirin's in the first aid cabinet."
Hawthorn pursed his lips faintly, eyeing Saquash. Saquash was rummaging industriously in the table's long drawer for, it turned out, a spoon. Finally Hawthorn's shoulders rose and fell a little, and he ambled off through the door at the back as if he'd always meant to do it, anyway.
Saquash gave a contained snort of laughter. "Old Prickly's a swell guy, actually," he said, and handed me the spoon. "But you have to make him run his own errands, sometimes."
I dug into the soup. It probably wasn't as good as it seemed at the time, but that still leaves some room at the upper end. "Hawthorn's a Dragonstooth Hill guy?"
"Yep. But we let him hang around just to show how broad-minded we are. Actually, I think he's interested in Rico's illusionist, this guy you're helping her chase down. Maybe they haven't forgotten, up on the Hill, that Soho is full of their kids."
"I hadn't thought B-town cops had so many regulations."
Saquash cocked his head. "Like what?"
"Hawthorn said he had to do something to clear working outside his jurisdiction."
"Eh. That sounds like Old Prickly. It's more a courtesy than a regulation. Nobody would give him shit for pitching in, but his conscience'd bother him for months."
Then Hawthorn came back, and we had to stop talking about him. He had an unlabelled, sweaty beer
bottle in one hand and the aspirin bottle in the other. From a pocket of his silver jacket he produced a ring of keys so big I wondered what he weighted the rest of the pockets with in order to get the jacket to hang so well. There was a bottle opener on the ring, with which he popped the beer. "No dark, I'm
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afraid," he apologize
d.
"Lager works, too. Thanks, Captain." I washed the aspirin down with what turned out to be a perfectly presentable pale ale. A little heavy on the hops for my taste, but I wouldn't have sent back a case.
The door to the hallway opened a little, and Vic stuck his head around the edge of it. I was startled, until I realized there was no reason why the copshop wouldn't have a back door. He took a quick survey of the room, spotted Hawthorn, made a face, and drew his head back again. The door closed behind him. I don't think Hawthorn noticed.
"Make yourself comfortable," Hawthorn said. "I've radioed for my authorization. If the call went through, there should be no trouble about it, and we can go after that motorcycle in about an hour."
Saquash caught my eye over Hawthorn's shoulder and winked.
Before Hawthorn could turn away, I asked, "Do you think this might be it?"
He raised his eyebrows.
"I mean, that the owner of the bike might be the person Rico's after."
He thought about it. "Frankly, I doubt it. This fellow seems to be too good at covering his tracks to have risked being anywhere near High Street when his trap was sprung."
"Good." When Hawthorn looked surprised, I added, "Rico would be ticked if this turned out to be it, and she wasn't there."
I finished the soup, the beer, and the coffee while Saquash popped in and out of the room on various errands, and finally disappeared altogether. Hawthorn sat at another table with a pile of paper. I felt much better after the food. Relaxed. And after all, who'd mind if I put my head down and caught a nap?
Surely they'd give me a poke if I started snoring.
I closed my eyes, and opened them on a different room, with a window across from me that was letting in the commotion that birds make just before dawn. I was lying on a cot in a room the size of Rico's office. The rest of the furniture was a stack of cardboard file boxes along
one
wall. I was only slightly alarmed, because I couldn't think fast enough or well enough to figure out what there was to be alarmed about. When I sat up, my head did the breast stroke, but the rest of me was fine. I stumbled to the door and out into the hall.
It looked as if I was still in the station house, so I tried drawing a bead on the front room. I managed to follow the trail without actually running into any walls. At last I pushed through a familiar-looking door, and the tug on my brain went dormant again.
The first of the morning shift must have just come in; a blond, slightly chubby guy in his thirties and a halfie woman with forest-green hair and a Chinese dragon tattoo were passing papers back and forth while they dunked their tea bags. Vic was there; he was sitting backwards on a chair talking to the first two cops. I couldn't tell from what I caught if he was filling them in on the night's events or airing his prejudices.
Hawthorn was at one of the big oak tables, cradling a coffee cup. Just for a moment, he wore the closed,
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stony
expression that highborn elves sometimes slip into, when they're not being social. The
n his eyes
"Sun and shadow, you're awake! Are you all right?" At the alarm in his voice, the other two looked up as well.
"Hey, Sleeping Beauty!" Vic called out. "You movin' in here, or what?"
"Bad cop," said the green-haired woman without looking up from her papers. "No promotion."
I ignored them both. "I'm fine," I said to Hawthorn. "Why didn't somebody wake me up?"
"We tried," Hawthorn said. "We couldn't."
I frowned at him, trying to make sense of that. I'm not a heavy sleeper, particularly.
"We tried quite hard, in fact. Finally Officer Saquash and I carried you in and put you on the cot, and he headed for home. I've been trying to wake you every hour or so, but it wasn't doing a bit of good. I'd nearly resolved to get a doctor."
"No, I don't think I need a doctor." No question, though; I still wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders. I once heard that it takes four hours for a bear's body temperature to get back up to normal after a winter in hibernation. I felt as if I were about two-and-a-half, maybe three hours warmed up. I sat down in one of the straight chairs.