Hammered (14 page)

So I punch him in the arm with my good hand and what I say is, “Feed Boris for me.”

Razorface puts a hand heavy as a slab of meat on my shoulder. “You keep in touch. I don’t hear from you every twenty-four hours, I’m coming looking. Got it?”

I nod. “Go fight crime. I’m just going to a hospital, to see a man I hate.” Scars fade. If you live long enough, everything fades. Face knows that.

I hand him the keys to the Bradford. He gives my shoulder an extra squeeze before he turns away. I watch him out of sight.

Then I turn around and get in Barbara’s car.

We’re strip-searched at the border, of course, but my CA veteran’s card lets me keep my sidearm, along with a warning to keep it unloaded while traveling. Once the female sergeant in charge of the interview realizes where I fought and how badly I was wounded, she’s interested and extremely polite. Barb, I note, passes through with a Unitek corporate ID card bearing the maple leaf.

Border Patrol doesn’t see the need to take the car apart, thankfully, or we’d be there all day.

Back in the car and northbound again, I stretch out in the passenger seat and stare out the window at the trees. They look yellowed, unhealthy. None of the native species like the new weather much.

I feel much the same, fingertips of my right hand tingling and my left arm a dull, throbbing ache. I’ve never liked being a passenger when somebody else drives—or flies, either. I’d rather have the responsibility. Control freak? Probably.

“How did you hook up with Valens?”

She’s got the car on autopilot, something else I never do, and she reaches out and flips the music off with one finger. At least she’s not watching 4-D on the console. “He came looking for me,” she says. She turns and examines me—a long, searching stare. “He figured if anybody could find you, I could, and he wanted to talk to you.”

I grunt. “After twenty years?”

She lets her shoulders roll under that expensive green silk, both hands off the wheel. It makes me want to reach over and grab hold of the thing myself. Worse, I keep catching sight of her out of my bad eye, and the gun she’s got tucked up under her left armpit makes a bulge that my targeting scope insists on painting dark red.
As if I didn’t know the threat level already.

Border Patrol didn’t take her gun? Unitek must have even more juice than they used to.
And they used to have plenty. Even before they started funding Canada’s space program and a good chunk of its weapons research. “I know you’re bullshitting me. You may as well spit it out.”

She sighs. “Jenny, I’m telling you everything I know. I’ve had a chance to regret some things, all right? When Valens got in touch with me, it seemed like an opportunity to mend some fences. We’re neither one of us getting any younger. And if you’re as sick as he says …” Her voice trails off suggestively
and she looks back at the road, resting her hands on the wheel. It rocks slightly as the car adjusts course.

If I’m as sick as he says.
Because that leads us back to the main reason I’m in this car—the data she beamed to my HCD, the case histories and the unhappy prognosis. And Valens’s recorded assurances that there was a treatment now for progressive neurological atrophy brought on by the primitive cyberware, and that the other three surviving recipients of the
original
central nervous system devices he pioneered were doing just fine with their upgrades.

He even said that in his recorded message.
“Upgrades.”

“We can reverse a lot of the scardown now, Casey. You’ll be amazed. Obviously the data aren’t in yet, but I’m theorizing we can get you another thirty years of mobility if everything goes well. And we’ve learned something about pain management, too.”

Just so much software and hardware, wired into the wetware. Rip it out. Replace it. Whatever doesn’t work is trash, throw it away.

I glance sidelong at Barb. “I heard you were trying to get ronin to go after me. You could have just put the word on the street that there was trouble and you needed to talk to me. I would have found you.”

“And let the sharks know my baby sister might be less than able to defend herself?”

It wouldn’t have stopped you back then. It didn’t stop you back then. I remember what you were like, when Nell died. Or before I left home.
But that’s water under the bridge now, isn’t it? “How did you know where to find me, Barb?”

She turned back and shot me a grin. “I put a tap on your buddy Castaign’s phone, of course.”

Just like that.

Except the numbers still don’t quite add up.
And that’s not what she said this morning.

Charlie ran a hand across his clipped, thinning fair hair, scrubbing at the back of his skull. He lifted his shoulders and grimaced, then placed both hands on the edge of his desk and levered himself to his feet, blinking his contacts clear. An armed guard—taser only, in the airtight confines of the station—fell into step behind him as he left his lab.
One more thing to thank John for. A guy can’t even take a piss around here anymore without an escort.

As he was leaving the head, Colonel Valens stopped him in the hall. “Charlie.”

“Evening, Fred.” He couldn’t remember how long he’d been on a first-name basis with the base commander, and wondered occasionally how he had ever found the man forbidding. “You look like a man with a mission, sir.”

Valens bobbed his chin down, half a nod and an ironic smile. “All work and no play. How are you doing on the DNA sequencing?”

Charlie fell into step beside him. “It’s not exactly DNA, although it is a long-chain organic molecule. And I’ve gotten distracted by something interesting, frankly.”

“Interesting, or
interesting?”

“Yes.” He held his lab door open for Valens, noticing that the guard was standing just far enough away not to seem to overhear.

Valens preceded Charlie into the room. “Tell me more.”

“Have you been reading my weeklies?”

“I’ve been up to my ass in paperwork, and a little brinksmanship over the salvage vessels. The Chinese have decided that testing our perimeters is not enough, and they’ve actually been sending in surface teams. But that’s neither here nor there; tell me what is interesting.”

Charlie kicked his chair to one side and perched on the edge of the desk, away from the interface plate. “We’ve been using a scanning electron microscope on some of the samples from the shiptree. Consensus is, it was in fact grown. And then reinforced. Let me show you something.” With deft fingers, he tapped up the holographic display and pulled up an image queue.

“Surgical nanites,” Valens said promptly. “Q class. Neurosurgical. I’ve used them.”

“Right. Look at these.”

“Holy … oh.”

Charlie felt the grin pulling his lips wide when Valens came the last five steps to lean in close to the projection.

The colonel poked one finger into the hologram, singling out one magnified image among crawling dozens. “Those are from S-2? Are they as small as this indicator shows?”

“Yep. And still active.”

“I can see that. Well.” Valens leaned back on his heels, head shaking slowly. “These are responsible for the microreinforcement of the shiptree’s hull.”

“And what appears to be a sort of artificially enhanced nervous system. Which hooks up to the cables I had theorized were VR links. Yes.”

The silence was gratifying. Charlie looked up from the display. Valens’s face was still and pale. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “that that ship was—alive? That it still is?”

“Well”—Charlie tapped the interface off—“no. Or, more
precisely, somewhat less alive than a sea squirt is, after it becomes sessile and eats its brain. No—”he held up a hand to forestall questions. “That was a digression, and never mind the biology lecture right now. What I’m saying is that the thing has a rudimentary nervous system. What it means? Well, there’s still research to be done. More interesting—”

Valens cut him off. “More interesting, you’ve discovered something that could revolutionize the treatment of spinal cord injury patients, if we can figure out how to use it. Is that where you were going with this?”

“Yeah,” he said with satisfaction. “If we can figure out how to make these things, and make them safe for human use, not only can we fix what’s broken … but, Fred. We may very well be able to make people smarter or faster, cure or fight a whole raft of neurological conditions … These babies are hot.”

“So I see.” Valens clapped him on the shoulder. “Send me the report. I’ll contact Dr. Holmes at Unitek, and make sure you receive the credit your work is due. Charlie …”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.” The colonel turned, springy on the ball of his foot in light gravity, and left.

Razorface stopped under the rust-red metal awning, left hand on the pull of the big blue door. Derek and Rasheed waited across the street, leaned up against the brick of a tenement building beside the parked Bradford, which Razor planned on wheeling inside as soon as he got the
bays open. The three of them should have been the only people around.

Razor glanced right, where three rolling metal bay doors were closed and locked in the cinder-block wall of the shop. Flaking paint scrolled across them. Razor knew the mural said something about auto body and appliance repair, but he wasn’t sure exactly what.

“Might as well come on outta there,” he said, taking his fist off the handle. And damned if it wasn’t that cracker detective, Mitch, with the Polish last name, stepping out of the shadows of a doorway down the street and strolling up Sigourney with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his ratty corduroy pants and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip like he’d been intending to come over and say hi any minute.

Razorface felt his nostrils flare, and grinned.
Goddamned cops in my neighborhood. What is the world coming to?
The pig didn’t even look him in the teeth when he smiled, and he had to give Kozlowski that. He was cool.

“Razorface,” the cop said, drawing first one hand and then the other slowly out of his pockets and showing them empty. “Seen your boy Emery over in West Hartford the other day talking to a 20-Love. You keeping a close enough eye on him?”

Fucking cops, just trying to stir up shit.
Razorface grunted and turned away.

Mitch kept talking. “Maker isn’t home. And I need to talk to you about Mashaya Duclose.”

“I got nothing to talk to nobody about,” Razorface answered, setting the key card Maker had given him to the reader. The lock flicked back and Mitch’s brow crinkled. Razorface’s boys started moving forward from their place across the street, and Mitch took a slow step forward.

The pig’s voice dropped and leveled, dead calm. “Where’s Maker, Razorface? And how did you get her key?”

Razorface paused with the door half open. “Visiting the fam,” he said. “I’m feeding the damn cat. Gonna bust me for it?”

“Her family.” Mitch reached up and caught the door before Razorface could quite step inside and pull it shut behind himself. Over Mitch’s shoulder, Razor saw his boys coming up on the cop. He shook them off with a minute jerk of the head, turning his attention back to the weedy little policeman, who was still talking. “Sister maybe? Black-haired gal about so tall?”

Razorface snarled silently, stepping through the door. “How much trouble Maker in, piggy?” Damned if he wanted to care, but he owed her. Owed her enough to come down himself to feed her goddamn cat because he knew she wouldn’t want anybody but him poking around in her stuff, when by rights he’d rather set fire to the stupid animal.

The cop shrugged. “Let’s go inside and talk about it, shall we?”

Their eyes met, pit bull and terrier coming to some unspoken agreement that didn’t involve either one backing down. Ten long seconds later, Razorface stepped away and gestured Mitch through the door. There was no way he was turning his back on a cop.

Inside, he entered the code Maker had given him into the security system. A pressure seemed to come off his eardrums when the sonics powered down, and he made sure the door was locked behind them. Then he followed Mitch into the shop.

It looked just as it had before they left for New York. He saw Mitch examining things in that cop way of his, and grunted, bending down to unlock the ratproof safe holding the cat food. There was still a couple of days’ worth in the automatic feeder, but Razorface topped it off anyway,
ignoring the cop. He suspected Mitch was trying to get under his skin.

It wouldn’t do to show it was working.

Boris came out from under the Cadillac and started winding around the cop’s ankles, and Razor shook his head. Typical. Who was doing the feeding? And who was getting the thanks? He saw it as more or less a metaphor for the workings of the world, now that he thought about it.

Course, it might have something to do with the cat smelling Razorface’s Rottweiler on his pants. Maybe.

“So what the hell do you want?” Enough quiet time. He wanted to get the conversation over with and get home to Leesie, although he wasn’t about to let any of the boys know that. His jaw ached, as it did more and more these days, and his chest ached, too, no matter how much iron he lifted. The air sucked, was all it was. Better here in Maker’s shop, though—she kept the scrubbers going.

Mitch opened his mouth to talk, met Razorface’s eye dead on—and stopped. His jaw worked twice, and just as Razorface was about to turn around on his bootheel and stomp out, words followed. “Can we quit bullshitting each other and work together on this?”

Quiet and sharp. And Razorface started to snarl something about not needing no help from no fucking cops, and
Maker’s gone, she’s gone with somebody she hate. Somebody she scared of. Scared for me because of.

He heard his own voice saying, “Fuck yeah.”