Authors: Finder
I didn't feel free. I didn't want to go very far away, or for very long, because I had the inexplicable twitchy certainty that the worst was still to come. I went out for groceries, and to get some clothes from my place. There was a note stuck under my door, from Yoshi, saying that some girl had come by to see me, and hadn't said if she'd be back.
Some girl? Didn't sound like Rico. Besides, Rico would have left her own note. I went downstairs and banged on Yoshi's door.
He opened it cautiously. "Oh, hi, guy. C'mon in."
I shrugged and stepped into his front room. It was a lot like mine, but with more dirty laundry. "I'm
in
a hell of a hurry. Tick-Tick's sick, and I'm over at her place taking care of her."
"Jeez, that sounds serious." He knuckled his eye sockets. Yoshi's natural hours are a lot like mine; he'd probably gotten up fifteen minutes ago.
"It may be. Yosh, what's this about a girl?"
"Oh, yeah. She came by last night."
This would take a while. "What kind of girl?"
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He squinted at me. "Funny you should ask.
It was kinda hard to tell."
"What?"
"Well, no. I mean, you could tell. She was human, red hair, wore a lot of black. You know, like a lot of people. Only at first I thought she was fat, but she wasn't. And kinda—"
Tiamat. For the love of God, Tiamat had come looking for me. "Tall in places? As if she'd been stretched on the rack? And sullen?"
Yoshi blinked. "Yeah! Only not sullen. I thought she was a little scared, but she might've just been shook 'cause you weren't home."
Shook was right, because it would have taken a lot of shaking to bring Tiamat looking for me. And I couldn't go looking for her, not with the Ticker waiting back at her place. Rico? No. If Tiamat was scared, I wasn't going to help things by sending her a cop. I banged my fist off the doorframe, which made a satisfactory noise, and hurt.
"Hey, guy, do I knock your apartment down?"
"Yoshi—" She might not be at the art supply store anymore. It was the only address I had, though.
"Yosh, will you carry a message for me?"
I told him where to find the store on Woodruff. He looked disgruntled. "Why can't you go talk to her yourself?"
"Yosh, I can't. I can't leave the Ticker. If you find her there, tell her where I am. Don't tell anybody else around the place," I added, thinking that Tiamat's friends might not be as ready to talk about it as she was, if she was. "If you don't find her—well, maybe she'll come back here and you can tell her then."
Yoshi was staring at me in a speculative fashion. "Is this, like, really important?"
"It's a lot like really important." I remembered the gun. "But seriously, don't say anything about it to anybody but her. Don't mention my name. And if she's not there, pretend you just came in to look at art supplies."
"You have a really weird love life, guy, you know that?"
"Don't mess around over this. It has nothing to do with my love life."
"Yeah, right," he said.
I wasn't going to convince him. "In that case, did you ever read
Romeo and Juliet
?"
"Sophomore year in high school," he said, confused.
"Remember what happened to the cool best friend, Mercutio?"
"Yeah, he got offed," Yoshi replied, as if he
still
nursed a sense of outrage over it.
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"Good. W
hen you're doing this, think of Mercutio and do otherwise. I gotta go."
"What? Orient, hey—"
But I was on the sidewalk by the time he got to his next question mark.
Tiamat didn't come; Rico didn't come; Ms. Wu didn't come. Nothing came but dinner time, and night, and the predictable rise in Tick-Tick's fever. Her legs and arms hurt her, and her chest muscles from the coughing, and her throat likewise. I wished I had something stronger than willow bark tea to give her for the pain. But I gave her as much of that as was good for her, and an hour or two after midnight she settled into something almost like restful sleep.
I was sitting at the open window looking down into the street, trying to unwind enough to fall asleep myself, when the vehicle nosed in to the curb, drifting smooth as a ghost walking—a ghost that
grumbled under its breath in a low-pitched voice. Moonlight slid over the needle-curves of the front fenders, turned the windshield to running silver, and made the driver's rumpled hair colorless, but I knew it was brown. The engine noise died.
My stomach felt as if it were trying to crawl up under my lungs to hide. Tick-Tick's fault for teasing; it was only that I was afraid someone else would think what the Ticker had thought, I told myself. And I couldn't very well deny it if the question didn't come up, because
I
couldn't bring it up. My God, what if—someone elseùhadn't noticed anything, and I were to say, "You don't have to worry about me, because
I
don't have a thing for you." I could imagine the look I'd get. I'd have to kill myself out of aggravated embarrassment.
Rico turned her face up to the window, and the moonlight fell full on it. "Orient," she called up softly.
"Sorry I'm late."
I hung my head as far out the window as I could, to keep my voice from waking the Ticker. "I'll be right down," I told Rico.
I remembered, for a wonder, to take a set of keys with me when I went; it would look so good to lock myself out of the building.
She was leaning on the car when I came out, lighting a cigarette, and I smelled the smoke of coltsfoot, clover, and bearberry leaf on the cool air. I was about to sit down on the stoop when I realized there was a lit one in her hand already, and she was holding out the freshly-fired one to me. Lordy, I hadn't stopped for a smoke in—days? It seemed like days. I walked over slowly and took the cig, brought it to my mouth and realized with a sudden uncomfortable force that it had just been in hers. She was
watching me, so I took the drag and pretended my hands were steady.
"You look like shit," she said.
A list of responses occurred to me, starting with "So do you," which wasn't true, followed by "You don't," which I didn't want to say. I shrugged.
"How's Tick-Tick?"
That was one I could answer. "Lousy. She can't eat, she can't sleep… I don't know. Ms. Wu said she'd be back around, but she hasn't come yet. I think I'd better go fetch her. How's Linn?"
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Rico's cigarette
flared scarlet in the dark. The reflection of it shone in one e
ye, until a blink seemed to
wipe
it off. "Lousy. He's up at The Lilacs, which is where you'll find Ms. Wu right now. She
's more or
less living there."
"Tick-Tick says it's a pretty lah-di-dah place."
"It has been. Right now it's more like a field hospital."
I frowned at her, but she couldn't see it in the dark. "What do you mean?"
"Sorry, I forgot; you wouldn't know. Whatever Linn and Tick-Tick have, it's achieved epidemic status, and The Lilacs is the only medical facility in town that specializes in treating the Trueblood population.
They're too crowded and too busy to put on airs, right now." She took another pull at her cigarette, and nothing happened. "Shit," she said, with a little more force than was called for. I fumbled for matches, but didn't have any. Hers were in her jacket pocket; she took them out and struck one. When she cupped it to her cigarette, I saw the reflection off the wet lines on her face.
"My God. What's wrong?" I asked her.
She tossed the match away as if it had betrayed her, which it had. "Ms. Wu lost her first two patients to it today."
I didn't stop thinking—or if I did, it was only for an instant, and after that my head was full of thoughts, running around like people trying to get out of a burning building. This didn't mean Tick-Tick would die. Maybe those two elves were already weak, old or wrung out with wild living, or susceptible to this sort of thing. Tick-Tick wasn't susceptible to anything. She was strong. We'd caught her illness early, earlier than Linn's even, and maybe those two people hadn't realized how sick they were until too late.
Just because some people died of a disease didn't mean every person who got it would. People had died of the flu, of pneumonia, of heart attacks, and none of those things killed every person who had them. It would be all right.
But Rico was scared enough to cry. And she'd said "her first two."
"How… Does she think she's going to lose more?"
A deep breath from Rico, fairly even. "She thinks so. It's too early, I gather, to get a really clear picture of the progress of the disease. She can't tell yet who to be hopeful about."
I grasped at my last straw. "But she's sure that Linn's got the same thing, and that Tick-Tick has it, too?"
Her head turned a little toward me. "Yeah."
We smoked in silence for about half a minute, before I said, "Should I take her to The Lilacs?"
"You should ask Ms. Wu, but I wouldn't think so. She'll probably rest better here. Keep her isolated, though."
"It's still only elves that get it?"
"So far. Not even any halfies reported, though if I were them, I wouldn't press my luck. Humans don't
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seem to get it, which
means The Lilacs is pulling in human doctors and teaching them fe
y medicine and
thera
peutic magic. It's unheard-of, but they have toùthree-quarters of the Trueblood
staff is either down
with it, or showing symptoms, and can't break quarantine."
I closed my eyes. "How many people have got it?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows, in fact—you have to assume there are a lot of unrecognized and
unreported cases all over town. It's not as if Bordertown has a public health department. There are leaflets going out to all the neighborhoods, though, describing the symptoms and explaining treatment, and stressing the need for isolation. About all anybody can do."
I finished my smoke and crushed the butt under my sneaker. "How's your case?"
She turned her face in my direction again. "You talked to me yesterday."
"Just thought I'd ask."
"I've been busy." She said it softly. I knew she'd been busy in some of the same ways I had.
"Tiamat—the girl at the art supply store—came looking for me at my apartment last night. I've sent word to tell her where I am. Maybe she'll try again."
Rico shifted abruptly, impatiently. "I can go talk to her."
"You could. But she didn't come looking for you."
"God damn you," Sunny Rico said, still softly. "Don't try to take this all into your own hands."
"She won't come to you, because you're a cop." I felt as if I were accusing her of something, and I think it sounded that way, too.
"There are things I can do that you can't. Because I'm a cop."
With the cigarette gone, I wanted something to do with my hands. I would have put them in my pockets, but my jeans were too tight to make a smooth gesture of it. I took a few steps down the sidewalk