Authors: Finder
"Anyplace is fine. Can I get you a beer?" I hoped he'd say no and go away. Whatever I was doing, I didn't feel as if I could stop in the middle of it.
"Thank you, I'd like that." He sat down, and I pried the cap off a bottle and handed it to him.
"What can I do for you?"
He drank some beer, and sighed. "That's a good one," he declared, nodding at the bottle. "I've come to ask a favor, if I might."
"Ask away."
"I need to find Detective Rico."
Ah, well done. He hadn't asked the question, which would have forced me to do the same and live with having the answer, whether I felt like giving it to him or not. I walked across my nice clean floor to the front window. There was a motorcycle down below, a dashing number, with a raked front fork and
sweep bars. Hawthorn's? It seemed out of character—he didn't seem like a bike guy at all—but I
supposed he had to drive something, or walk. "Nice wheels," I said.
"Thank you." He seemed about to add something to that; then he changed course and said, "About Detective Rico… ?"
"I'd be glad to take you to her," I told him, "but I don't think I ought to."
"I beg your pardon?"
This was going to be difficult. "She's busy."
"Young man, I am also busy." Hawthorn seemed about equal parts offended and amused. "I wouldn't like to violate your professional ethics…"
"I'm sorry. It's not that. It's just—something she told me makes me think that she shouldn't be interrupted right now."
He folded his lips together tightly and sighed. "It's a matter of great importance."
"You could leave her a message—"
"And I'd prefer to be as discreet as possible."
If this had to do with getting Saquash locked up. Sunny might very well break my neck when she found out I hadn't helped. On the other hand, if my making it possible for Hawthorn to find Sunny was
A B B YY.c
involve
d in tipping Saquash off. Sunny would break my neck for abs
olute sure. "I really can't do it," I
said
finally.
He shook his head and stood up. "Excellent principles, if a little misguided in their application," he sighed. "I will not hold that against you."
"You can finish your beer before you go," I offered, as an apology.
"I'd best take it with me, if you've no objection."
"On a
bike
?" I asked.
He laughed. The cap was still on the counter; he picked it up, fitted it over the mouth of the bottle, wrapped his thumb and index finger around its edge, and squeezed. "Thank you for the beer. I hope we'll meet again soon."
"My pleasure," I called after him, slightly stunned. Now
that
was grip strength. He gave a jaunty wave as he headed down the stairs. A moment later I heard his bike pull away.
I shook my head and began to retrieve my furniture from the hall. I had the kitchen table in the door before I realized what I'd seen.
Had he done that on purpose? Had he
expected
me to put two and two together? Or did he think I wouldn't remember that he'd handed me a sealed beer bottle that night at Chrystoble Street copshop, the night I was drugged?
I dropped into the chair, because it's better to sit still when your brain is doing highway speeds. Two cops. Saquash doing the legwork, and Hawthorn… oh, what odds wouldn't I give that Hawthorn was the big guy?
If
the pyramid even stopped with Hawthorn, which I didn't want to think about. Sunny would find out, once she started investigating. Why hadn't Sunny realized it might go beyond Saquash? I hadn't, because I hadn't had any practice at this kind of thinking, but shouldn't Sunny have been more wary?
Why was he looking for Sunny? Ye Gods—because of the sealed lab. There was no reason to expect
Saquash to come back after picking up his parcel, but Hawthorn could have. Hawthorn would know the lab end of the business had been smoked.
And he came to me—maybe to find Sunny, but probably to find out what I knew, too. He would want to know if Sunny was after him. Well, she wasn't yet. I'd have to find her after all… except that the same problems arose in finding Sunny that I'd explained to Hawthorn, or rather, hadn't been able to explain. I understood just enough of what she was supposed to be doing to know that I didn't dare interrupt her at it.
I had to find Hawthorn instead. If I could follow him, keep him from destroying evidence, warn Sunny if it came to that—well, I had to try. I stuffed my keys in my pocket, loped downstairs, got a clean T-shirt off the line and put it on, and went out to the street for the Ticker's bike.
I hopped on and almost turned the key without looking. I called myself some rude names for being a slow learner. I slid off the seat carefully and looked the bike over, including in and under the sidecar. It was clean.
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I settled back down behind
the handlebars and thought about that. It would have b
een easy to get me out
of the way by wiring t
he bike. Even easier to bump me off in my apartment just now. But he'd c
hecked
me out and decided I didn't know he was in it, so it wasn't necessary to kill me. It was almost comforting to know that we were dealing with someone who was at least that fastidious about his trail of bodies. I fastened my helmet, started the engine, and got a Thataway for Captain Hawthorn.
Up the hill and Up the Hill was where it led me, to the costly confines of Dragonstooth Hill, where if people aren't well fed it's by choice. Bordertown is taller there, and not just because of the slope of the land. Wealthy elves live in pastel glass spires that sometimes top a hundred feet, that look as if you could bring one down with a single well-placed brick. Except all the bricks are in the humans' buildings, and so is the pink granite and the pale gold sandstone, shaped into neo-castles and pocket skyscrapers that their owners are terribly proud of whenever the elevators work. Little parkways twine between the feet of buildings, dotted with fountains and sculptures and gardens with roses imported from the
Elflands at Great Cost. It's the kind of neighborhood where you'd never expect to find a hair in the sink, except when people in paint-stained cutoffs and faded T-shirts ride up from the great downbelow. Then passersby look at you as if you've come to take the caps off all the toothpaste tubes in town.
I homed in on one building, and circled it to be sure. The answer to my question about Hawthorn was.
Right here and straight up. I hoped the elevators were working.
I didn't know what building it was, but it seemed to be a public one. People stared at me, but no one told me I had to leave. I walked purposefully toward the back of the center lobby, found a small, badly-lit corridor, and followed it to the service elevator. It was on some kind of chain-lift system and made an ungodly noise, but it got me to the top floor, which felt like the one I wanted.
Now all I had to do was tramp up and down the halls looking conspicuous until I found a door to lurk outside. If I ever did this detective thing again, I was going to pack a disguise kit.
One dubious "Can I help you?" spoken in a penetrating voice, and I would have been pinned like a butterfly in a box. But I was lucky; all the doors in the hallway were closed, and nobody seemed to be going in and out of them. And the door I was looking for, the Thataway door, was right in front of me.
There was no name on it, only a symbol, a ring enclosing three clusters of leaves. It was flanked by two huge planters, big enough to hold a young tree each, which is pretty much what they held. It was a good thick wooden door, with no transom and no inset window. It did have a mail slot, though. I knelt on the floor, lifted the flap slowly, and put my eye to the opening. Nothing; the slot sloped down on the other side, and blocked my view. But the sound wasn't bad.
A female voice I didn't recognize was saying, "… here? You're mad. Take your little murders back down into the slums. You said that's where they'd stay."
"This is different." Hawthorn. The pull that had led me disintegrated.
"But on my doorstep? By the Crown, you promised me—"
"Why not? What better way to control all the evidence? Do as I say and you're in no danger."
"No. You've made a mull of the business. Our agreement—"
"You would find it… disagreeable… if I were to be taken, and made to testify."
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There was a m
oment of silence on the other side of the door.
"I certainly would," said the one I didn't recognize, and for the first time in my eavesdropping, I thought that, given a choice between being caught by Hawthorn and being caught by the woman he was talking to, I might as well flip a coin.
They'd been sitting down, which was all that saved me from having to make the flip; I heard the chairs scrape as they stood up. I let the mail flap down as slowly as I could force myself to do it, with all of my nerve endings screaming at me to run. If it made a noise, I hoped it was small enough to be covered by the sounds in the room. I scrambled behind one of the planters and made myself very small as the door opened and Hawthorn came out. The door shut behind him. He pushed through another door to the right of the service elevator, and after a moment, so did I. The sign on that one said "Roof."
The stairs came up in a greenhouse. I realized that they came straight up into the greenhouse without any more enclosures or doors just in time to be able to keep my head down below the floor level. I could hear Hawthorn moving around, rustling, banging things, sliding things. I stretched my neck and stole a look between the stair railings.
I couldn't see a thing. It was a beautiful greenhouse, with full-sized trees and ornamental shrubs and basins and beds of flowers, and my line of sight was full of leaves. I crawled up the stairs on my belly, to the end of the railing, and all I got was a view of a different bunch of leaves. I could hear Hawthorn, though, off to my left. There was a row of tall, narrow evergreens growing along one glass wall; if I could get to those without being seen, and get behind them, I could straighten up and have a look.
As I slithered across the floor, deaf to anything but the hammering of my own heart, I wondered if Hawthorn had a gun with him. Though with a grip strong enough to cap beer bottles, he didn't really need one to take care of me. I could smell the evergreens. Then I was between them, my back against the glass, and I could breathe almost normally again. I stood up and peered out through the boughs.
He was wiring up a bomb. It looked pretty much like the one I'd seen under Sunny's dashboard, though admittedly I hadn't been able to see that one very well. He wrapped a couple of connections and
proceeded to tape the whole thing to the underside of a little rustic bench beside a potted azalea. I watched him work and found myself agreeing with the unseen woman downstairs: Hawthorn had to be
nuts. Did he think he could blow up something on the Hill and not start up a hue and cry? And on his own doorstep?
No—that was exactly why it would work. Nobody would believe that the woman downstairs had
anything to do with an explosion that had happened near enough to take the plaster off her ceiling. And when the hue and cry started, Hawthorn would throw Saquash to the hounds—ideally, dead, so he
couldn't deny anything. Case closed, heat off, back to business as usual.
But that wouldn't work, because Sunny had found out about Saquash, and would get a statement out of him damn soon, if she hadn't already—
Wake up. Orient. Who did you think the bomb was for?
Hawthorn's head came up sharply. "Who's there?"
I could have sworn I hadn't made a sound. Could he have heard Sunny, arriving earlier than he'd