Emma Bull (44 page)
Authors: Finder
Cascade was the green-haired halfie cop from Chrystoble Street, and Wally was her human partner.
Kathy Hong I remembered from the remains of the derelict apartment building. I sent them up, so they could read the elf her rights, or whatever the real-world equivalent was in Bordertown. I was so tired I could have dropped down and slept on the floor. I wanted to go away, but it would have seemed like breaking something. And I wanted to go back upstairs, but I knew I had no place there. I sat downstairs in the lobby and told myself it was so I wouldn't have to look at Hawthorn lying there being dead.
Eventually I felt a touch on my shoulder, and raised my head off my knees. It was Sunny.
"Can I go home now?" I asked. "All my furniture is out in the hall."
She raised her eyebrows. She'd taken the sunglasses off, and she looked almost as dazed as I felt. "That's not delirium talking, is it?"
"No."
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"We
ll, you can't go home, because if I'm going to have to sit up watching you sleep again, I'd just as
soon do it in the comfort of my own place."
"That's right. Oh, boy. I get to find out what having your throat cut is like."
"If you're lucky, I'll time it right, and it won't come to that."
"Did you know Hawthorn was in this?"
"Not until he sent me a message asking me to meet him here. I thought there might be somebody besides Toby—I couldn't see Toby
running
the thing—but I didn't know who until then. As soon as I got his note, I realized he was it, and the note was his one stupid mistake. So I came early and brought some friends."
"You trusted them—Cascade and Whatshisname, Wally, and Hong?"
"I had the least reason to
mistrust
them, anyway. Why were you here?"
"Because I didn't know you already suspected Hawthorn."
She snorted, and rubbed her eyes. "Well. I'm glad you did it."
"Ye Gods, why?"
"You don't think you helped?"
"No. No, I think—" The hot thing materialized in my throat again. "I'm sorry for what I did and said up there. I didn't mean it."
Sunny shook her head. "I know how much of it you meant. It's all right."
I looked up at her.
"Honest," she said. So I believed her.
I stood up and sagged a little, and she caught my elbow.
"You want me to drive?"
"Ah. Yeah, I think you'd better." I handed her the keys. "Who was the elf woman?"
She was helping me into the sidecar before she answered. "First Secretary of the House of the Weeping Birch. A commercial family with interests on both sides of the Border, and a reputation for being…
intent on growth. Maybe at the expense of a few other things. It looks like Weeping Birch was
Hawthorn's backer. The next challenge is to prove they knew what they were backing."
"I heard them talking, when I first showed up. It sounded as if
she
knew."
I put my helmet on, sank back into my accustomed place, and pretty much passed out for the rest of the ride. I was too tired to feel more than an aching nostalgia about the change of drivers. I wasn't worried; I
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knew it'd hurt like hell again
later.
I slept on Sunny's couch that night, in my clothes. Neither of us said anything about alternatives to the arrangement, either past or potential. I had a dream that Hawthorn's last moments were a sad, sordid betrayal scene, and woke to the knowledge that, of course, it was true. Also incriminating, but by then that was almost beside the point. Sunny roused me up just before I could absolutely swear that the little silver knife had been the murder weapon. The omission wouldn't bother anybody, and it certainly didn't bother me. Eventually, I would describe the dream to a roomful of solemn people, some of whom were taking notes. It's in the court records, if anyone wants the details. I don't have any taste for repeating them here.
Getting On with It
Previous
Top
I moved my furniture back in, every piece of it in a different place from the one it had been in before…
before. Then I rendered the whole effort pointless by spending most of my time at Tick-Tick's. I was housecleaning there, too, boxing up the things I didn't plan to keep, sorting the things I did, and in between, stopping in the middle of whatever I was doing and staring at nothing until something brought me back to the present. By the second day of housecleaning, people began to figure out where to find me; then the interruption of the trancelike state would often be a friend dropping by with a little food, an offer of help, and a couple of words that, if they didn't make anything better, at least gave me an excuse for talking out loud. Yoshi showed up, around mid-morning of that second day after Hawthorn's death, with a cheesecake.
"Where'd you get this?" I asked.
He looked mildly affronted. "I made it."
"Yosh, you amaze me."
"Hey, the way I figure it, you gotta eat. So you gotta learn to read a recipe. It's like being able to tune your bike." He flushed and shot a quick glance at me, to see if that had been an unfortunate thing to say.
I asked quickly, "You mean you do stuff besides cheesecake?"
"Oh, yeah. But hey, I didn't take home ec. or anything. I taught myself how."
I nodded. "More manly that way."
"Like you'd know, guy. Hey, that woman, the cop, what's her name? Rico. She was by your place a couple times."
Ah. "Did you tell her I was mostly over here?"
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Yoshi l
ooked down at his feet for just long enough to suggest that there was a story in that, a
nd that he
wasn't going to t
e
ll it to me. "Well, the second time I did. Like, once I figured that you'd want me to, I
told her. I mean, you
did
want me to, right?"
"I did. You're a standup kinda guy, Yosh." Well, maybe I could ask Rico—Sunny—what they'd said to each other. If she dropped in.
Wolfboy and Sparks came up a few hours after that, to consult me about the last arrangements for the funeral, which was the next day. I didn't know Sparks very well, and I'd been afraid I'd be uncomfortable putting matters partly in her hands, maybe having to accept the wrong sort of sympathy from her and be polite about it, for Wolfboy's sake. But she seemed to be transformed by the occasion from sweet, self-conscious, and slightly vague to capable, sensible, and slightly brisk. When I hinted at that (a lot more tactfully than I've described it here), she nodded. "I turn into my mom my granny, and all my aunts.
What they don't know about laying people out's not worth knowing."
We settled what needed settling, and I asked, "How's the store?"
Sparks looked at Wolfboy as he limbered up his pen, and I was impressed. I'd known a lot of
relationships where one partner answered all the questions addressed to the other one, and those had been pairs of people who could both speak.
Slow
, Wolfboy wrote.
Didn't realize how many of the customers were elves
.
I frowned, and he pulled the notebook back toward him.
You've been away. The virus is spreading, and
the ones who don't have it are staying out of public places so they won't get it
.
"I guess I have been away. And I didn't even go anywhere."
Knew that
, he wrote.
You'd have sent me a postcard
.
"Trust me," I told him, "the view really sucked."
He made a "whuff" sound that was as good as anybody else's "I hear ya." No, better, because I knew he really did.
"Plan on dinner at the store tomorrow," Sparks said. "Bean soup, big salad, hard-boiled eggs."
I met her eyes, startled. She nodded just a little. You ate hard-boiled eggs after the funeral, during
shivah
, to remind you that life was always renewed. I felt the tears start, the ones that could still too often be surprised out of me. But I got them blinked away this time. "I'll come," I told her.
She and Wolfboy said their goodbyes. As they stepped out into the hall I saw them reach for each other's hands.
Several fits of abstraction later, I heard knuckles on the doorframe and looked up to find Sunny standing there. I wished suddenly that I'd closed the front door downstairs, just so I'd have had a little warning.
"Is this a bad time?" she asked.
I thought of a possible response, rejected it, and then said it anyway. "Depends on what you want to do
"Just wanted to pass on news. It can wait."
My God, did she
want
me to send her away? "No, now's okay. Have a seat. Oh, wait a minute." I cleared the debris off the nearest likely chair, which was the one with the dairy-cow cushions.
"Thanks."
"Yoshi said you'd been by my place."
"Oh, your housemate." The corners of her mouth twitched upward. "I hope he never takes to a life of crime."