Authors: Finder
expected? No, he wouldn't have spoken aloud if he'd thought that.
A B B YY.c
"Don't
make me hunt you out. Show yourself."
Every minute was worth something. He could damned well come and find me.
The suspense made my stomach chum. I watched him come toward the greenhouse wall, steadily nearer.
and when he began to penetrate the evergreens I gave up and stepped out of them, about three plants down.
He didn't cry out, "You!" and fling out a hand dramatically. So much for old movies, or wherever it was he learned his affable stage persona. That's all it was; no one would have seen anything paternal in him now. He stood within reaching distance of me, but he didn't reach. He just looked, his head a little to one side, his eyes narrowed.
"I would have taken an oath," he said at last, "that you didn't suspect me."
I swallowed with a dry mouth. Wolfboy had taken me to every
film noir
picture that had ever hit town. I proceeded to mine that resource with both hands. "I never would have, except that everyone else seemed to."
His expression didn't change. "Indeed?"
"Sunny's got half a file drawer's worth of stuff on you. And if you go down to the lobby, you'd better leave the elevator with your hands up, or they might get the wrong idea. The nice lady down on the top floor sold you out."
He let me think it was going to work, I know he did. Then he smiled. "Pull the other one," he said. "It's got bells on."
I met his large, warm silver eyes and kept my mouth shut.
"I would like to hear how you came to suspect," he added. "Surely it can do no harm now."
I drew a long breath and let it out. "The beer bottle," I told him.
I saw his face change as he worked that out. He shook his head. "The snare of vanity."
"Where did you learn to blow things up?"
His eyes narrowed a little more, and he smiled. "From Walt Felkin, actually. He rigged the abandoned apartment. And he advised me on the plans for his own house, though of course he had no notion that that was what it was."
"You blew Walt up with his own explosives?"
"No, just his expertise. The materials were police confiscated property."
Among Walt's last words had been "backstabbin' sonofabitch." They seemed pretty accurate. "This is—
this is the part of the movie where the villain tells the hero everything, because he's going to kill him anyway. Except that I can't think of any more questions."
A B B YY.c
"You aren't the hero," Hawthor
n said, rather kindly. "You're a pawn. And I really tried not t
o have to kill
you. Go sit down on that bench."
I looked at it and shook my head. He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward him, then twisted my elbow up behind me. The grip strength wasn't just for beer caps. I didn't have any choice but to walk to the bench and sit on it. "You might not have wanted to kill me, but you came pretty close a couple of times."
"And in every case, there was no reason why I should have expected you to be there. You're a fairly well-known person in Soho. Your death would have been noticed. I thought we should avoid being
noticed for as long as possible." He knelt down by the bench, and I leaped up to make a dash for it. He shot out a hand, caught my wrist, and yanked me back down, damn near breaking my arm in the process.
Then he unrolled a long, thin wire from under the seat. "In a minute, I will be going downstairs. You'll be staying here to wait for Rico."
From the direction of my evergreens, behind me, Sunny said, "Oh, why don't we all stay?"
I wanted to turn and look at her, but I was looking at Hawthorn instead, the expression on his face, and the motion of his hands toward the package taped under the bench. I kicked him in the face.
It would have worked better if I'd been wearing something heavier than sneakers, but he still fell back. I sprang off the bench. Sunny fired her pistol and I was instantly deaf as a blue-eyed cat, but I saw a leaf fly up from a bush next to Hawthorn's neck, and a pane of glass in the greenhouse wall shatter.
"The bench is wired!" I shouted to her.
She'd stepped forward to keep Hawthorn in her sights. She was a storybook cop brought to life: the gun braced with both hands, her stance wide, the jacket falling open over her holster, her mouth a straight, uncompromising line under her sunglasses. She scared me to death, but I knew she wouldn't scare
Hawthorn.
My ears were working again; I heard Hawthorn scream something. I looked toward the sound.
The plants were moving. The azalea stretched out branches into the path, the potted trees writhed their limbs and bent their trunks, and the evergreens leaned and twisted in toward the center of the
greenhouse, toward me. I heard Hawthorn's running steps, but I couldn't see him.
Sunny was beside me, the pistol aimed along what had been the path, before the plants had crawled into it. "It's an illusion!" she yelled, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. "God damn it" she growled,
"why do I carry this thing? Come on!" And she leaped straight through a thrashing vine and disappeared.
By the time I reached the top of the stairs, the greenery was all back where it belonged, and Sunny was careening through the door at the bottom. I followed.
The door I'd listened through was standing open; so was the door inside that, that connected the front reception room to the beautiful dark-panelled office beyond it. An elf in a pink silk suit, her fine straight white hair cut to sweep her shoulders, stood in front of the rosewood desk. Her eyes were beautiful, and round with horror. She had a silver letter opener in her hand. Hawthorn lay on the rug at her feet with his throat cut, and a little above the hem of the pink skirt there was a thin arc of dark red.
The elf looked up as we came in, her face full of terrified appeal. "He—he tried to—I had to defend
I don't think we stood frozen for more than a second. It seemed longer because I was busy. He couldn't be dead, not so quick as that. It must be another illusion. But no, Hawthorn was Thataway, on the floor, which meant this was real, didn't it? Could an illusion trick that sense, too? The elf's voice was the one I'd listened to through the door, talking to Hawthorn, the one who had agreed, in that cold, steady way, that she wouldn't want him to testify.
"The hell you did," I heard myself saying, and I walked forward.
I thought, as I did, about the way any trick seems to work once in the Borderlands, and how so few of them work twice. But I closed my hand over Hawthorn's still-warm, wrist, and had just enough time to realize that this was one of the second kind, before I went down into the dark under a large dose of his life and death.
I came to with my face in the carpet, and there was a bit of time when I couldn't remember why. Then I groaned and rolled over, and interrupted, I'm told, a speech in which the elf assured Sunny that the trauma had probably killed me.
I suppose, if I'd taken the time to think about it, that I had trusted Sunny to know what I was doing, and to make it work. I hadn't been wrong. By the time I was conscious and noticing my surroundings again.
Sunny had explained to the elf how well my adventure with Bonnie Prince Charlie's corpse turned out, and did she prefer to wait until tomorrow morning, or would she like to just confess now and save everyone a lot of trouble? All that at gunpoint, of course.
"This is nonsense," said the elf woman. "Think what you're doing, my dear. The word of one rather scruffy young human person against mine, and the influence of my house? Blessed Isle, everyone knows that kind of magic never lights on humans."
"Well, it's lit once before. Secretary, and in front of witnesses. Cut your losses, and maybe the judges will be nice to you."
The elf woman's jaw clenched. "Whatever I say, they will be
nice
. My house will see to it, as it will see to breaking you for your presumption."
"Honey, right now your house couldn't break eggs in this town, and you know it."
This was all going over my head. I had dragged myself to my feet with the aid of the edge of the desk, and was standing with both hands braced on the glossy expanse of rosewood, waiting for the bees to get out from behind my eyes. Things swam slowly into focus on the desktop: a silver fountain pen, a black leather blotter holder, a black leather box embossed with silver, open, with sheets of stationery in it.
Thick white sheets with hair-thin red and blue fibers in the weave. Paper that remembered its maker.
The woman in the pink silk suit had yanked Hawthorn out of our hands—
my
hands. Hawthorn had walked through Soho and seen us, the people who lived there, and knew that some of the ones he saw would die because of what he was doing. He had looked us all in the eye and set death loose among us.
This woman might never have seen Soho, but that didn't make it better. She'd never had to decide to kill; only to do business. Death was an operating expense. Even Hawthorn's death. His blood was, literally, on her hands, and all that was to her was the cost of solving a problem. The collapse of the passport ring
A B B YY.c
was only a
n affront to her professional pride. The mutation of the virus was nothing to her at all.
I crossed the room unsteadily to stand in front of the elf woman.
The skin between her nose and her upper lip twitched, as if she had controlled a sneer. "Stand off from me," she ordered. "I don't like the way you smell." But her eyes cut away from me and back, and away, as if trying to run.
"Orient," Sunny said sharply, "if you do anything I will throw you down the stairs."
"Why?"
"Because it's my job."
"To protect her from me? My God, then who the hell is left to protect
me
from
her
?" I swung around to glare at Sunny. She'd never lowered the pistol, and her eyes hadn't left her prisoner for more than an instant. I said, "If there were any fairness in the world, she'd be dead. Instead everybody else is, the world is unfair, and it's your job to enforce it?"
If she hadn't been tanned, Sunny's face would have been almost as white as the elf woman's. "Vengeance is not mine, remember? My job isn't punishment. It's not even dealing out justice. I don't get to decide right and wrong.
I only get to bring them in
."
My breath rasped over a burning lump in my throat.
"You don't want to be a good cop," I said. "You want to be a Knight of the God-damned Round Table.
There's a limit."
"There is a limit," she said, in a fierce, quiet voice. "I know exactly what it is, and you don't. Now shut up and go downstairs. You'll find Cascade and Wally and Kathy Hong in the lobby guarding the doors.
Send them up."
I had to go, or I would have choked on the coal in my throat. If she forgave me for those last words, it would be more than I deserved.