Authors: Finder
She opened the door and stood in it.
"Hello," I said, stalling for time.
"Hello. What's up?"
"I have a lump of new information for you."
"You," she said with a barely perceptible increase in force, "are not supposed to be concerned with information for me. At least, I remember telling you so. Do
you
remember?"
Ouch. "Could we go somewhere a little more private? And comfortable?"
"What for?"
"Oh, for crying out loud. Look, I have things you should probably hear. Is it going to do either of us any good for you not to hear 'em? Will that make it all right that I didn't do what you told me to?"
She breathed out, loudly. "No. But if I listen to you, it'll only encourage you. Christ, I have to listen to you, don't I?" She stepped back and held the door. "Come on up."
I would have loved to have known how long it ordinarily took Rico to go up four flights of stairs, but this wasn't a fair test; she climbed them at a staid pace out of respect for company. The stair layout suggested, as the doorbells had, that each floor was a separate apartment. The fourth floor certainly was.
It had a tidy floor plan, probably not much different from the way it was when the place was built. The walls were mostly white, framed and bordered and vaulted in dark oak, except for the dining room, which was papered in a small-figured monochrome print of flowers and leaves in a light rusty-rose. A
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row of ca
sement windows set into the front wall of the parlor were all open. Rico led me through the
parlor, the dining room, and down a short ha
llway with a couple of closed
doors in it to the back of the
apartment, and the kitchen. This was mostly white, too, and none of the very few things on the
countertop was purely ornamental. It was the kitchen—the apartment, in fact—of someone who couldn't spend a lot of time there, and when she could, didn't want to spend it dusting knick-knacks. Still, something about it made it strongly hers, and I was torn between feeling as if I ought to tiptoe, and wanting to sneak looks into cupboards.
Rico gestured at a little drop-leaf table under the back window, and one of the chairs pulled up to it.
"Tea?" she asked. "Beer? Blackberry juice?"
"Beer, please." I got a look in her icebox as she opened it. It had lots more things in it than mine, and none of them seemed to have green stuff growing on them. She popped the tops on the beers and set one in front of me. It didn't have a label. I took a swallow. "That's familiar."
"Huh. My neighbor down the street makes it, but not for sale. I wonder where you had it. It's a nice summer hammock beer. Not very fizzy, either."
"A little heavy on the hops." Then I remembered. "I had this at Chrystoble Street! This is the same stuff Hawthorn brought out from the back room."
"That accounts for it—I take extras down to the station house, sometimes. Now, are you going to tell me what all the excitement's about?"
I told her about yesterday's adventures. I gave her a good-sized sampling of the reactions we'd gotten to our questions, which made her wince, but she motioned me to go on. I told her what Camphire had
overheard from Tiamat, and I told her about my conversation with Tiamat, and our subsequent meeting with Tiamat's friends.
"Oh, good," Rico said at last. "Drug-crazed elf wannabes with a gun,
with
bullets. The town thick with paranoid-bigot rumors. And Linn sick in bed."
"In bed, is he? Whatever he's come down with, he's given it to Tick-Tick."
She frowned. "When did he have a chance to give it to Tick-Tick?"
Time to decide if I was going to give Linn away to his partner. I decided not. "He came 'round to her place yesterday to grill me about the bomb, but the Ticker says she probably caught it from him the day before, at the hospital."
Rico continued to frown, and stare at me. Her jaw moved, as if she were absently probing a tooth with her tongue. "That seems odd. Doesn't it?"
"Does it?"
"Have you ever seen an elf with a head cold?"
"No," I said, after a little consideration. "But you learn something new every day."
"I've never seen one. And forty-eight hours is pretty quick incubation, I think, for respiratory bugs. If it's
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that easy for elves t
o catch a cold, we ought to have seen an example of it before this."
"It must be a real beaut, anyway—Tick-Tick's never sick."
She shook her head. "This bothers me. You saw Linn yesterday?"
"Yeah. He seemed tired, and he had a hell of a cough, but he said it was overwork and the smoke at the bomb site."
"But of course, that's not what it was after all." Rico raked her fingers through her hair, across the top where it was shortest. She was sitting in a patch of sun from the kitchen window, and the light sparkled back from the occasional white hair amid the brown ones.
"How old are you?" I asked suddenly.
"What?"
"Sorry. Never mind."
"Not as old as I feel right now," she sighed. "Oh, and speaking of things that make me feel old, I consulted Milo Chevrolet yesterday about this stuff we're—I'm after."
Milo was one of the most powerful magicians in Bordertown; he'd used some of that power to carve out a magic-free space to live in, which he'd filled with three hundred volumes of nonfiction and a model railroad. He could make a fetus feel old. "And he says?" I asked, cautiously.
"He was annoyed when I kept calling it a drug. He says that properly it's a mutagen, if it's making permanent changes in the bodies of the people taking it."
"It's a who?"
"Never mind. Until somebody fails to die of it, there's no saying the changes are permanent, anyway. I reserve the right to save time and call it a drug. Unfortunately, he hasn't seen any of it."
"Well, Tiamat has."
"Mmm. Ordinarily, I'd have that art supply store staked out, and follow this Tiamat around until we found the next link up. But lately when I find people, they tend to get snuffed."
I considered this. One of the snuffed, of course, was someone
I'd
found, but I appreciated her restraint in not mentioning it. "Why?" I asked.
She looked at me as if I were a rare form of bread mold. "What do you mean, why? To keep them from leading me to the next link in the chain."
"No, I know that. I mean, why is it an unavoidable result?"
Rico's turn to consider. She scanned my face as she did so, but as if it might have been any face; she was just looking at me for something to look at. Still, I felt as if I might be blushing, so I concentrated on drinking beer. Yes, too hoppy. What a shame. Could have been a contender.
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"Linn's the
only other cop I can trust absolutely," Rico said finally. "The ones I
don't really suspect of
being
in the trade, I can't be sure will keep quiet. They might trust people I wouldn't. And
I don't know
how long Linn's going to be sidelined."
"So why do you need Linn?" After his proposal to me the day before, and Tick-Tick's analysis of it, I confess I didn't entirely trust Linn, though I had a hard time imagining him involved with the bad guys in this case. "Take care of it yourself, and you don't have to worry who trusts who."
"Whom."
I frowned at her. "Are you sure?"
"Cross my heart." She made the gesture over the light green cotton of her very large shirt. I felt as if I were invading her privacy and looked away. "I need Linn or someone, because you can't stake out a place by yourself,
and
be prepared to follow any of the tenants if they leave."
"Oh." I finished my beer. "You'll find somebody to do it."
"What, no volunteers?"
"I've proved that I get in trouble if you let me out of your sight."
This time it was my face she was looking at. "If I thought you'd done it on purpose, I'd give you free room and board in jail until this business was over."
"No, you wouldn't. Just think, there I'd be within reach of the corrupt mystery cop. He might do me in to keep me from interfering."
"I haven't been that lucky." She finished her beer. "And I don't think you get in trouble on purpose. I think it's pure natural aptitude. But do you think you could maybe curb it for a few hours at a stretch?"
"Excuse?"
"Don't be thick. I hereby invite you, grudgingly, to share my stakeout." She took up both bottles and carried them to the counter. Then she turned back and gave me a look that felt as if she'd grabbed the front of my shirt with both hands and picked me up. "But before you get puffed up about it, listen to me: This is not a God-damned Hardy Boys adventure. This is all live fire and real trouble, and more people's safety than just yours on the line. You do what I tell you, and if you do one thing more than that I swear I'll drop everything to deport you under police escort back to the World." I was at a loss for what to say.
"Your line," she said grimly, "Is, 'Yes, Ma'am.' "
"No," I said at last, "I don't think that's it."
Her eyebrows went up. "Come again?"
"That's not how you and Linn work, is it?"
"Linn is an experienced professional. I know what to expect out of him, and he knows what to expect from me. We have a couple of years' worth of shorthand that allows us to react to surprises as a team.
You don't have that, and if I were to count on you as if you did, I might as well stay home and play
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Russian roulette."
I didn't think I reacted, but she was looking at me
, and added, "Sorry. But that's the
I folded my hands on the tabletop and looked out the window. It
was
a nice neighborhood; the wooden balcony was in good repair, and recently painted, and sported a wooden folding chair and a little table with a candle on it, any of which would have eventually wandered away from a back stoop in my
neighborhood. From the distance between Rico's balcony and the one on the back of the buildings across the way, I suspected there was a small courtyard below.
"Whatever it is, go ahead and spit it out," she said.
Still looking out the window, I said, "I have a partner, too." Rico didn't say anything, so I went on. "We have that kind of relationship. We don't usually do anything as dangerous as you and Linn, but we break a lot of trail in the Nevernever, and travel rough, and we have to count on each other to decide the right thing pretty quickly. So I understand what you're saying."
"And?"
"And that's why I can't just promise to take orders. I know myself. I'm not in the habit. I just won't. That wouldn't bother me—I'd go ahead and promise, and do what had to be done, and explain myself to you afterward—except for one thing. You insist on taking responsibility for what I do. Linn said that was why you didn't want me to work on the case anymore. Which is okay, if you're the boss and I'm the lackey, and all I have
to do
is remember to ask, 'Do you want fries with that?' But that's not how it'll happen, and you won't be responsible for my actions, but you'll try to be. On those terms, I think I'd rather stay an outsider, and work with
my
partner, and spend another day like yesterday. It may have been uncomfortable, but you can't say it didn't work."