Authors: Finder
Sunny held the door wide, and when I'd rolled out into the alley, she locked it behind me. Then she climbed into the sidecar. It was an awkward movement, not like the way she'd gotten into the Triumph.
"Take it away," she said, fastening the second helmet under her chin.
Driving didn't feel strange, but not having to give directions did. Except for that, we followed the same drill we had all day. I found our spot, and waited on the bike while Sunny did her reconnaissance. I had a twitchy certainty in the pit of my stomach that this was the one, this was the place the passport came from. From that I passed on to realizing that I had no idea what Sunny planned to do about it. Whatever it was, she wasn't crazy enough to do it by herself. Was she? On the other hand, they had just blown up her car.
So when Sunny came up beside me out of the dark and shook her head, telling me that no, this wasn't The Place, my feelings were mixed, to say the least. I stalked in without a thought for baseball bats or anything else, and told the six complete strangers living there, all of them larger than me, that I knew they didn't have two brain cells to rub together among the lot of them, but if they wanted to hold on to any of the rest of their pitiful personal attributes, they'd flush the goddamn passport down the nearest toilet and get their butts down to the free clinic for a virus check. Unless they didn't want to, in which case, I sure wasn't going to cry at their funerals. They stood, slack-jawed and empty-handed, while I delivered my advice, and not one of them moved to stop me when I left. I suppose my being damp,
filthy, and stinking reinforced my image a little. In retrospect, I recognized one of Tiamat's friends from their fight with Tick-Tick and me, but I couldn't remember which one she'd been.
I slammed back out of the house and threw myself on the bike. Sunny was already in the sidecar.
A B B YY.c
"Now wher
e?" she asked, in a rather small voice.
"Thataway," I growled, and pulled into the street.
The little hand-lettered sign on the door said it was a cooking school. We looked at each other.
"It's always the last place you look," Sunny said, peeling the helmet off.
I made a quick inward check, and found another location in the queue. "This isn't the last place."
"Last one
I'm
going to tonight."
"What if this isn't where Mister Big hangs out?"
Sunny raised her eyebrows at me. "I wonder? I've been assuming that the brains of this outfit will have enough of them to stay as far away from the product as he can. No, I'm not expecting to net the big fish here. But I think we may find some evidence to connect him to the stuff."
"Don't talk about fish," I said. "You sound as if you know this is the place."
She gave me another significant look. "A cooking school?"
"Not all bad guys have a sense of humor."
She slithered out of the sidecar. "I'm going to have a look."
"Wait! If this
is
the place, what are we going to do? Is this a go-in-with-guns-blazing kind of gig?"
"You know, I can see white all the way around your eyes. Since I have exactly one gun, which works exactly some of the time, I don't think that would be the best plan, no."
"Then what
is
the plan?"
"I'll tell you as soon as I make one," she said, and walked off into the dark.
I sat on the bike in the lee of the building across the street and reminded myself of all the reasons I was there. They were good and sufficient, but they didn't take up much time. I thought about Tick-Tick. Her bike had started on the first try, which seemed to me like an omen. If anything was in tune with her health, it was this engine. Tomorrow morning I would go to visit her and be told that her fever had broken, just at the moment I'd cranked her bike, and that she was on the mend. And what the
hell
was keeping Sunny?
I could have recited poetry to myself to make the minutes pass, but I've never been able to memorize any. What if I heard gunshots? What if I didn't hear anything at all? Why didn't this job come with instructions?
Across the street, in the shadow of the cooking school wall, I saw Sunny in silhouette. She jerked her head at me in a come-along gesture.
A B B YY.c
For a moment I didn't think about what the gesture meant. But it wasn't "no." This w
a
s The Place. The
bad guy—or guys—had a sense of humo
r after all.
There was a multi-paned window along the side, the kind that pushes out at the bottom to open. It was a warm night; the window was open. The glass was frosted, but if you stood to one side you could look through the opening and see part of the little room beyond. That's what Sunny and I did.
The last time I'd seen that particular kind of mess was when I'd helped Wolfboy move out of his
apartment. It had that characteristic look of a place half dismantled, half thrown away, half packed.
There were a couple of cardboard boxes on a counter with things wrapped in newspaper sticking out of them, and a wooden fruit crate on the floor leaking excelsior at the seams. Beside it was a spray of broken glass and a puddle of liquid. Several bags of trash were propped by a door, and a broken chair teetered on top of them. A filing cabinet drawer hung open, with a file folder sticking out; more file folders were scattered on the cabinet's top.
My first thought was that they knew we were on to them, and were trying to clear the place out before we got there. A little reflection told me that was impossible, and that there was a much better reason why they'd be packing up and skipping town. It was the virus, of course. They would have figured out before we did what the vector was. They might even have decided to quit making the stuff in the interest of public welfare. No, based on what was going on in there, it didn't seem like they'd decided to quit.
All the people in the part of the room I could see were elves. Three of them sat at a long table, each one doing a different job: measuring sky-blue fluid into little glass tubes, sealing the tubes with metal foil, writing something on the seal and poking each tube into—the end of a candle? It certainly looked like a carton of household-grade candles, each one with the blunt end hollowed out to fit the tubes. Sneaky.
Pop the thing in a wall sconce, light it—nobody but me would be likely to find someone's stash in the bottom of a half-burned candle.
As I've said, it's hard for humans to figure out an elf's age with any accuracy, but I like to think I'm pretty good at it, and my guess was, the three at the table were hardly old enough to be out after dark.
Runaways from over the Border, working for food and a place to sleep, most likely. Not mastermind material.
The one who stood on the other side of the room was older than the kids, with a narrow, clever face and his silvery hair worn in Romantic-poet curls over his forehead. He was scowling.
He snapped at someone in the part of the room we couldn't see, "I'm not a tradesman. The cost of materials is no concern of mine. If you can't afford them, I shall find another patron."
The person he talked to said something in a low voice. The angry elf replied, "That has nothing to do with me. You are a shopkeeper and the child of shopkeepers; you think only of profit, and not of honor nor of knowledge, which may win you honor. It is these peddler's instincts that have drawn strife down upon your head. Had you but supported my work openly, as would any knight of the true lands, no ill fortune could have attended the enterprise."
I still didn't hear what his companion said, but I heard the voice more clearly. It seemed familiar. I stole a glance at Sunny, and found her hard-eyed and tense.
Whatever the speech was, it made the curly-haired elf sulk. "I could have done it. That we fell short at first was only to be expected. With money and time I could have refined the process; relieved of secrecy,
A B B YY.c
I could have matched each
dose to its taker, like a glove made to fit a hand. By queen's
blood, I could
have rais
ed even you!"
"That's enough!" growled the other voice. Definitely familiar. Whoever he was, he had to be pushed before he'd project well enough to be heard out a window. I couldn't make out a word of what he said after his outburst.
The older elf turned to the table and snarled something in the language of the Elflands, and the kids, looking frightened and resentful, filed out of view, past the speaker we couldn't see. They must have left the room; a door slammed and the older elf winced. Then he snatched the box of candles off the table in a careless, haughty gesture, and carried them off what I thought of as the stage, toward the other person.
A few more indecipherable sentences, and we heard the door slam again.
Sunny grabbed my arm and yanked me toward the back of the building. We were trying to be discreet and quiet, so we made it to the rear corner just in time to see the back door open. It and the steps down from it were lit by a torch in a bracket. Torchlight was enough to keep someone from falling down the stairs, and enough to make it easy to recognize the man on the steps. Toby Saquash, who'd had third shift desk duty at Chrystoble Street Station the morning I found Walt Felkin.
Sunny didn't look surprised; she must have had all the reaction she was going to when she recognized his voice. Saquash put the box of candles in a hardshell case over the rear fender of a dark-colored Yamaha Virago and mounted up. When he started the engine, Sunny said next to my ear, "Would you be able to find him?"
I nodded. I'd
liked
Toby Saquash. How could somebody I liked have been responsible for the passport, for the virus, for bombs, and death by falling, and my partner weak and sick in the care hostel? "You're not going to let him take that batch out of here, are you?"
"Calm down. He won't distribute it in a hurry—he can't. He knows as well as I do that when these things get rushed, people make mistakes, and that's when they get caught. Besides, we spent the whole day playing jacks with his customer base."
The Virago bounced away down the alley, taillight dark. "Now what?" I whispered.
"We find out how many people are in the building."
As far as we could tell from looking in and listening at windows, we'd already seen all the occupants.
Sunny tried the front door, and nodded when it wouldn't budge.
She knelt down beside the lock. "Keep a lookout," she ordered. I did, but the street was deserted, so I saw most of what she was doing. She took a piece of thread out of her pocket, and a box of matches, and pulled a hair out of the back of her head, where it grew longer. She wet the thread on her tongue, twisted it together with the hair, and wrapped both around the lock plate. Then she struck a match and poked the paper end into the keyhole. The words she murmured weren't in the language of the Elflands, or in any language I'd learned in the World. They might have been Latin. She said the last one with extra force, though still softly, and as she did, the flame disappeared down the matchstick into the lock and went out.
"Didn't work?" I asked.
"Nope, worked just fine. Look." Around the lock plate there was a line of faint iridescence where the