Authors: Finder
"Bother," Tick-Tick said at my shoulder, "no booths—wait, other side in the middle."
We nodded to people as we crossed the room. An elf, identified as a member of the Bloods by the red leather headband and a cut-off, shredded red tank top, glared at me for an instant; then his face cleared and he nodded back. I'd found his kid sister's stolen cycle a month ago. A muscular man, mahogany brown, with a blackwork tattoo over half his face and down his neck, looked up from a copy of
Dubious
Truth
and a cup of tea and smiled vaguely. He was a sculptor; he'd come to me about a copy of a book on Calder's mobiles. I read it before I passed it on. Life ought to be one long education.
A B B YY.c
County H
ell Fairgrounds was on the sound system, and the window glass quaked audibly with every
extra-low not
e. We claimed the booth just as the bass player grabbed a fistful of strings and climbed
the
alphabet with them.
"How does he make his hands do that?" I asked.
"Too much Fairport Convention in his youth," suggested Tick-Tick. "Shall I make the A-sign at Peach?"
I thought about the alternative. "Yeah. It's too hot for stout. Ale sounds right."
The Ticker sat up very straight, caught Peach's eye across the room, and made a pyramid with her hands.
Then she held up two fingers.
The front door opened again and produced a partial pocket of silence. Well, no, it wasn't the door, but the person who'd pushed it open. He moved smoothly on long, supple muscles that made him seem taller than he was. He grinned at the reaction in the room, which produced more of it, because the grin was full of large, white, pointed teeth in a long jaw, and the face and body were covered with smooth red-brown fur.
Tick-Tick made a scratch-that gesture to Peach and held up three fingers. The same hand turned into a waving white flag to summon Wolfboy.
"Ay, Lobito," I said when he came up. "You'll just have to sit with the scaff 'n' raff if you want a booth."
Wolfboy raised his hands palm-up and rolled his eyes to heaven in a perfect "Why me?"
Tick-Tick slid over to make room for him.
"How's Sparks?" the Ticker asked.
Wolfboy dragged a notebook and pen out of his back jeans pocket before he sat; then he flipped to a new page, wrote quickly (it must be hard to write quickly and well with claws on the ends of your fingers, but I suppose anything comes with practice), and showed it to us.
Way good. She's minding the store
, it read. Wolfboy and his girlfriend Sparks ran the best used bookstore in town. It made me feel almost old; the Ticker and I had known him since before any of us did anything useful with our time.
He slid the notebook back to his side of the table and wrote,
Heard a great new Camphire-ism today
.
Camphire was a Ho Street mural painter, and by either human or fey definition, odd. If there's an elven equivalent for LSD, she might have done too much of it when she was about six. He added to the page,
"
You have to break an omelette to make eggs
."
I stared at the sentence. "Oh. That almost makes sense."
"You're right," said Tick-Tick, and shook her head. "It must be the apocalypse."
Wolfboy raised one shoulder and both eyebrow equivalents, and wrote,
Or Camphire's a secret Sufi
master
…
nah
.
Peach set our bottles of ale in front of us, dug out her pad and looked hopeful. She was too shy to actually ask for an order. The Ticker opted for the casserole, Wolfboy for the Brunswick stew, and I
A B B YY.c
decided on the f
ish chowder. Peach smiled at me as if she'd been waiting all night for someone to do
"You're sure? I'm buying, remember," Tick-Tick said.
"You've never had Lucy's chowder, I can tell. Are there mussels in it today, Peach?"
She blushed like her namesake. "Lots. Um. And Bill just brought a cheesecake in."
"See?" I said to the Ticker. "I'm having dessert."
Peach smiled, blushed harder, ducked her head, and bolted for the kitchen.
Wolfboy wrote.
What did the Human Compass do to rate dinner
?
"Hisss," I said. "I drink your blood, Dog Nose."
"No killing," Tick-Tick said, "or Peach won't bring my order. He found my stolen wrench." She told the story with, I thought, less relish than she might once have. I couldn't decide if I felt bad about that or not.
Partway through Wolfboy shot me an odd sideways look, as if to suggest that he'd ask for the rest later, from me.
Peach ducked past again. "I set a piece of cheesecake aside for you," she told me, about as fast as the human mouth can move without stuttering, and darted away.
The Ticker propped her chin in her palm and regarded me with bland approbation. "She thinks you're cute," she said. Wolfboy giggled, a terrible thing to hear from a guy covered with fur.
I grimaced.
"Come now," Tick-Tick said. "What's wrong with Peach?"
"Nothing. She's a sweet kid." Wolfboy's cider-gold eyes fastened on me. "Guess I just like wild women."
"You like women who use men like you for toothpicks," the Ticker said, and now
she
had me pinned in her sights. Elf-silver and wolf-gold—or maybe wolves don't have gold eyes.
"Ahem," I said, looking at Tick-Tick. "Since I promised not to mention your last boyfriend in your hearing ever again, I'm at a little disadvantage here."
She grinned. "He was a double-dyed, thoroughgoing, ratfink louse. But he was the only thoroughgoing ratfink louse in my romantic history, which suggests that, unlike
some
people, I do not repeat my mistakes."
"Not yet, anyway."
Wolfboy sniggered and covered his eyes with one hand.
She ignored us both. "You realize, don't you, that your love life has a certain nightmarish quality? That where other people have affairs, you have imbroglios?"
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I held
my beer bottle in front of me like a crucifix. "Down, girl. No more about my love life before
dinne
r."
"Okay. Let's try your social life instead." It was a new voice, and familiar. I turned quickly.
Anyplace with laws ends up having something like police eventually. Bordertown had some laws.
Sunny Rico was something like a cop.
In a town where everyone dyed their hair, hers was uncompromisingly natural: light brown and showing a little silver over the ears, short on top and around her face and curving over her collar in back. Her tan was better than mine. I didn't know the color of her eyes, and couldn't see them now; silver Night Peepers wrapped across them. Her loose trousers and looser jacket were tweedy gray linen with a fleck of red. Very nice, and only a little conservative for the neighborhood's catholic tastes. She had a red Eldritch Steel T-shirt underneath. Both her hands were in her pants pockets.
"Detective Rico," Tick-Tick said, in the tone she uses when several drunk Pack members are blocking her way to the bar.
"Tick-Tick," Rico nodded in greeting. "Lobo. Orient. How do. Mind if I sit?"
I kept my face empty. "We have no minds."
"That's what Dancer tells me." She hooked a chair with her foot and pulled it up to the end of the booth.
Tricky, to remind us that she was a friend of Dancer's. They'd run in a B-town gang together once, before Dancer grew up and opened a nightclub and Sunny Rico grew up to fight crime. And there you have a yardstick for maturity in Bordertown, I suppose. I asked, "What brings you south of civilization?"
She wanted a favor, of course; that was what the reminder about her and Dancer had been for.
She studied us. "Social life. You know Bonnie Prince Charlie?"
Wolfboy nodded, and the Ticker said, "Somewhat." Rico looked back to me.
"Yeah."
"He died yesterday."
It held us frozen for a moment, like the glare of a camera flash. "Violently, I suppose?" Tick-Tick said.
Rico nodded, and her eyes came back once more to me.
I was damned if I knew why. Yes, I'd known Charlie. He came into Bordertown cocky, desperate to be a desperado. He told us his name was Charles Bonney, and to anyone who didn't recognize it, he pointed out that Bonney was Billy the Kid's name. It was Scully, lounging at a back table in the Ferret, who finally drawled, "So you're Bonnie Prince Charlie? Welcome name to the ane true Prin." The name couldn't help but stick.
Charlie didn't usually keep the company I did, or if he did, it was out at the brittle edge. Charlie worked questionable jobs for unpleasant people, ran errands in the service of projects I didn't want to know about. I didn't like him, I didn't dislike him. If he was dead, I probably didn't want to know why.
A B B YY.c
You can't always get what you wa
nt. "He fell out of the belfry up on High Street
yesterday," Rico said.
"The tattle i
s that he was playing a little turnabout on his employer. Got laid off in a big way."
"Why are you telling us?" I asked, because somebody had to.
"Because I'd like to find his employer."
Wolfboy spread his hands: Don't look at us.
I felt the same way. Then I heard, really heard, the infinitive verb in Rico's sentence.
"No," I said.
Wolfboy and the Ticker looked politely confused; they hadn't picked up the clue yet. Rico went on.
quickly, as if she had to convince them before they caught on. As if she had to convince anyone but me.
"Charlie was running for somebody doing business in a particular kind of designer drop. Looks like he ran the wrong way with something."
Tick-Tick leaned across the table. "Are you
choosing
not to speak English?"
Rico slid the Peepers down her nose and gave her a stare over them. Brown eyes. "He was taking illicit substances to people who wanted to purchase them, exchanging them for money, and possibly failing to take the money back to the place where the illicit substances came from. Better?"
Tick-Tick nodded, her whole face working to stifle a grin.
"Come on," I said, and I heard the way my voice cut across the civilized mood. "Charlie was a little thug. A little
Soho
thug. Thirty of 'em could be mowed down in an afternoon and the Silver Suits wouldn't look up from their paperwork."
"Not quite true," Rico assured me, her expression mildly wounded. "But you're right. I don't really give a damn about Charlie. So why am I here?"
We exchanged an uncertain glance—or at least, Tick-Tick and Wolfboy did, and tried to include me.
It was Tick-Tick who picked up Rico's question, cool and academic and dauntingly elven. "It's not the drug problem. Capital D, capital P. The Mad River itself is a dangerous drug for humans, after all, and I've never seen the police concern themselves with what Soho's children choose to intoxicate themselves with."