Authors: Finder
"And then?"
It seemed strange, suddenly, that she didn't know what had happened at Walt Felkin's place, that she hadn't deduced everything I'd done from evidence at the scene. That made me wonder how much
evidence was left there, of anything. "You're going to hate this," I warned her.
"Probably. But right now I'm getting down what happened, not how I feel about it. Keep going."
"I knew Walt would do his double-damnedest not to tell you anything. I mean, you or any other cop.
And I thought that might not be true if it was just me he was talking to. So I went 'round the front and knocked on the door."
At the pause, she looked up from her notebook and waited.
"Then I saw the bomb wired up to go off when the door opened. I yelled through the door and told him about it. He asked—after I told him I thought it had to do with the motorcycle, he wanted to know who sent me. And then he said something about… a backstabbing son of a bitch, and 'Fuck him.'"
I raised my hands to rub my head, which ached, and my fingers brushed against the bandage on the right temple. I settled for rubbing the left side. "After that—before I could stop him, he tried to get out the back door. Boom."
Rico didn't comment. Instead, she flipped back a few pages in the notebook and began to re-read what she'd written. I stared off into space, consoling myself with Tick-Tick's observation that Walt would have opened the door eventually, that that had been the bomber's original intention, in fact.
I was brought back to the room by a new intensity in the silence. Rico was looking across the top of her notebook, not quite at me, and I could see a muscle appear and disappear in her jaw as her back teeth worked. "Tell me again," she said quietly, "about what you did at the station."
I started to, and she said, "Slow down." I did, and she still stopped me with questions like, "Was that when Toby came back in?" and "Did you see Vic again after he left to check the dock?" and "Did Hawthorn leave the building while you were there?" and "Was that the first time you'd seen the two morning shift officers?"
I'd been hit on the head, but I still wonder why it took that long before I said, "You think it's a cop."
The blood had backed away from her face and left her tan gray. "Yes," she said, a little hoarse. "I think that."
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Afte
r four years in Bordertown, one would expect me to have given up being a nice suburban ki
d. But in
this,
at least, I'd held onto my roots; the idea that Chrystoble Street Station had not been
a safe place to
talk about the motorcycle was very hard to accept.
Rico must have seen that. "You were right the first time," she said. "Why destroy the motorcycle now?
Why do anything about it now, as long as someone isn't looking for it? Unless, that is, you find out someone
is
looking for it. The only people who could have known that, going by your testimony, were in Chrystoble Street. Unless you told someone else about it, and forgot to mention it." Her voice was determinedly flat, but I could still hear the hope that lay under the last sentence.
"No. But one of the cops might have said something to somebody."
"When?"
"Hell, J don't know. Rico, I can't see it. I can't picture any of those guys…"
She waited for me to try to find the words, and when I didn't, she offered, "… Killing people? It's the last resort in my job, but I have to be prepared to do it if the last resort comes around. So do they."
"Not like that. Which of them could do that?"
"Just at a guess, I'd say the one who doped your soup."
I stared at her.
"Oh, come on. You're not going to tell me that never occurred to you?"
When I found my voice, I said, "You bet. Every day. My God, of course it didn't. Where am I supposed to get all this practice at being paranoid?"
"I don't know, but you'd better start looking." Then she closed her mouth sharply, and after a moment added, "No, scratch that. You won't have to. Beyond developing a certain base level of practical street smarts, which is my parting recommendation to you."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you're off it. You're out of here. Done. I need to pick your brains about a few more things that happened last night, and then these last couple days can fade like a bad dream." Just too late she must have recognized the appropriateness of that; she winced.
I was surprised to find that everything inside me seemed to have stopped happening; I had a feeling of suspended time filling my ribcage. "I screwed up," I said. "I know that. It won't happen again."
Rico slapped her notebook against the arm of the chair. "God damn it, this is not a punishment." She sprang up out of the chair and paced to the other end of the room, stood there for a few seconds, and walked back to my bedside. "Not negotiable. You're out. Sorry if it cuts into your income."
I had my mouth open to tell her off, when I realized it was another of those characteristic sentences:
Sorry if it cuts into your income
. It built a cofferdam around the thing she didn't want to talk about, and let the discussion run safely around and on. And she expected me to respond in kind. This time I had no
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idea what she didn't want to
talk about.
I took a deep breath and nodded, and said, "I won't starve."
I saw a small relaxation in her face. She poised her pen over the notebook again and asked, "Toby brought you the food?"
"Anybody could have been in the back and added something to it. Except—while Saquash was getting the food. Hawthorn was out front talking to me. And once it was in front of me, nobody had a chance to do anything to it."
"What about the beer and the aspirin? Hawthorn brought those."
"The aspirin was in an aspirin bottle, the pills were stamped 'aspirin,' and I shook them out myself. That would have taken a hell of a lot of planning to set up."
"The beer?"
I reconstructed my memories. "No. The beer had a crimp-on cap. I watched him pop it off with the opener. I think you have to leave Hawthorn out."
"Maybe. Christ, this is going to be fun. I have to question everybody without making it look as if anyone's under suspicion. You say Hawthorn got on the radio?"
"He said he radioed for authorization to do stuff outside his turf."
"I'll check that. If he mentioned the motorcycle to the dispatcher, the field of suspects opens up like a sonofabitch."
I knew what she meant: The cops on Dragonstooth Hill would have the news. So would anyone in B-
town who'd monitored that frequency in the frail hope that radio transmission would, even temporarily, be working in the Borderlands the way it worked everywhere else. If I were the illusionist, I would try to keep an ear on the police band, if I knew there was one. It was still possible that Rico wasn't looking for another cop.
Except for the suspicious circumstances of my falling asleep in the police station. "I might not have been doped," I said.
"Of course not. And the Elflands may have disappeared again while we've been standing here, but it's not what you'd call likely." This time her expression reminded me a lot of one Tick-Tick might have used.
"Could it have been a spell?"
"I assume you would have noticed if anybody in the room cast one." She asked it as if it were a serious question.
"I've lived here for four years."
"Some people
are
thick enough that four years won't even make a dent.
Would
you recognize the casting
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of a spell if you saw it?"
"Thank you," I said pleasantly, "yes, I would."
"All right, then. That would rule out anything but a spell to put the whole station house to sleep, and according to what you've said, Chrystoble Street didn't turn into Briar Rose's country house last night. I could have someone sniff around the place for lingering traces of hocus-pocus, but there usually
are
some. We use it ourselves, any time it makes life easier."
She flipped her notebook closed and stuffed it back in her breast pocket. "I'm going to go before they throw me out. Thanks for giving me the rundown on last night. And don't be in any rush to get back on your feet."
I had forgotten. I really had, just for a minute, because we had gone on talking about the case, picking it apart. I hadn't realized that she was just questioning a witness. "And that's it?" I asked her.
"Linn may come around to ask you more questions."
"That's not what I meant."
"Oh, right. Send me a bill." And before I could repeat myself, she turned and walked out.
It seemed very quiet, in spite of the clinic sounds in the hall, in spite of the dry-grass sound of my breathing. Nobody was doing anything much today. I certainly wasn't. Nothing to do but get out of the hospital and go back to my slightly-interrupted life, which offered blessedly few opportunities to court disaster. What a relief.
The room was darker when Tick-Tick came back in. "I talked them into letting you go. Do you need help dressing?"
She plunked what she was carrying on the foot of the bed, and I recognized the component parts; she'd gone to my place and brought back some clothes. I wondered if the clinic had thrown out the ones I'd been wearing. There wouldn't have been anyone around to tell them that most of my wardrobe looked like that anyway.
"I think I can do it. Thanks."
"I promised you'd stay overnight with me."
Well, that was that, then. Tick-Tick was scrupulous about promises. She left the room to give me some privacy, and I slid out of bed. I was shaky, but it was nice to contemplate leaving the clinic, and that gave me the strength of purpose to get my clothes on. I was sore enough to be reminded of what it felt like to have a ceiling fall on me. No more of that, thank you, and no more of this. Relief was the word for it.
"Are you decent?" Tick-Tick called through the door.
I said what I was supposed to: "No, but I'm dressed."
She stuck her head in as I was limping cautiously toward the door. She didn't offer to help, because even
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if I had be
haved like an idiot and betrayed every intelligent piece of advice she'd
ever given me, she was
still my be
st friend and a damned considerate fey wight.
My nurse waited in the hall. "Need a chair?" he asked us.
Tick-Tick shook her head before I realized that he'd meant the kind with wheels. "We'll do very well,"
said the Queen of the Veldt, and offered me her elbow with a dashing air. I took it as if the gesture were mere gallantry between friends. Besides, she was too tall for me to throw an arm across her shoulders to hold myself up.
The moon had come out of its corner, silver on turquoise, and the sun was expiring under a count of ten.