LIKE I WILL repeat in a little while, it seems stupid to meet in a public place, but Tiger and Crane are insistent, so with a few days’ bed rest behind me, I mosey across the city on the lookout for distractions to keep me from the rendezvous, but damn me if I do or don’t, because Atlantic City seems to be generally behaving itself.
I meet the cops at a big overflowing bistro in the vanity precinct around the Bubble, a multi-block area stuck in an ongoing penumbra that resulted from the light-bending hero Infinity’s death fighting the Kirlians back in ’84. The pre-rebuild heritage values are adored and enshrined in the streets around the Bubble as well, a sort of mirror equal to the authentic vintage of the buildings within. The bistro patrons gape and peer at me, smart phones whirring into life to capture every possible bowel movement as I nod my head, smiling cheesily as I wade through, touch a waitress or two on the behind as is expected, then move to the table inside where the two cops await.
“You did this to me on purpose, right?” I scowl as I throw myself heavily into a chair and hold up two fingers to the perplexed and recently fondled waitress to guess at, me forgetting I’m not at the Flyaway or Silver Towers or whatever the hell.
“Actually it was me who wanted you out in the limelight, you roach,” John Crane says, features barely cracking as he delivers the line. “All these people around, even you couldn’t do anything to endanger them.”
“You know it doesn’t always come down to me causing the mayhem,” I answer. “In fact, it’s usually a case of me doing cops’ jobs. Remember? Cast your mind back.”
“We need to go through your statement about the Doro murder,” Tiger says, all business as she avoids eye contact, tapping a series of manila folders into shape.
“What about it?” I ask. “Have you got any leads yet?”
“We’re interviewing persons of interest as we speak,” Crane says.
“Oh spare me,” I snap, bringing every watt of my disproving glare to bear on him. “You can’t be serious, detective?”
My eyes flick to his cutesy partner looking so uncomfortable, and in a rare moment of tact I stop myself from prodding him to find out how much of his upset is knowing I have known his partner in ways I am sure he’s only fingered himself thinking about.
Tiger clears her throat, bringing Crane and I back from our mutual eye-fucking.
“Forensics confirmed there was no known point of entry,” she says. “The killer’s a ghost.”
“Or he smashed in through the kitchen window,” Crane offers glibly.
“Save the good cop, worse cop routine,” I tell him. “I didn’t kill Sal and you know it. Sticking a probe up my ass isn’t gonna help.”
“If you didn’t kill him, one of you people did,” Crane says.
“When you say ‘you people’ I assume you’re referring to handsome well-hung American gentlemen and not –”
“Masks,” Crane cuts in. “If not you, one of the other fruit loops running around the city.”
“I don’t know if you noticed lately there’s not so many of us running around as normal,” I say casually. “Hell, I feel like the only girl at the disco, if you get my drift.”
Crane and I lock eyes again, masculine ego dwarfing the fact he knows he can’t possibly go up against me on equal terms unless he’s hiding something beneath his off-the-rack cop clothes – though his antipathy to masks suggests the bigotry’s quite real.
Crane’s eyes flicker past mine and I’m startled to see his expression flower into alarm. Intuition tingling, I spin in my chair, ass leaving the surface as a lightweight aluminum arrow slices past where I was sitting and embeds itself in Tiger Murphy’s left shoulder, just above the heart.
“Holy shit,” I cry, catching a glimpse of a woman in red and purple with a composite bow on the steps into the restaurant proper, civilians scattering with a noise like cats in a blender.
Before I can Taser the assassin, I’m kicked in the middle of the back and go staggering into the table of tourists already startled to be listening in on our charade, the mother and two fat children screaming as Crane struggles to rise from the booth and draw his Glock in one smooth move.
*
BEHIND ME, THE lady assassin known as Q leaps again (yeah I know, the “lady assassin” bit makes me a relic, but I’ll wear it this time around), tall red leather boot spinning and crashing down on my slack-jawed expression, flinging me into the wall with a grunt.
More tourists and pedestrians scatter as Q karate chops John Crane’s wrist, the automatic 9mm dropping onto the table in front of Tiger Murphy squirming like a pinned butterfly, the arrow all the way through and nailing her to the upholstered padding of the booth settee lining the bistro walls.
I send out a tendril of shocking force, at one and the same time thinking not again while also knowing what a bad move it proved to be, meeting in a high profile location like this. Maybe I could’ve told the cops I have a bounty on my head, but following Crane’s tirade, I think I’m better off playing those sorts of cards pretty close to my chest.
Unfortunately, the latest manifestation of Q vanishes the same instant. The electrical charge plays out on empty air, and I get to my feet just as two more of the quantum-state killers snap in either side of me, one hewing with a gigantic katana I dodge, the other with a pair of brass-knuckled stun guns on her fists.
I capture the second woman’s arm, touching her electric arsenal to the steel blade of the passing no-dachi with a resulting snap, the other clone spasming and disappearing into the ether. With my captive still held fast, I twist about, using my body and momentum against her, the assassin off-balance for a moment. But either I’m not as quick on my feet as I think or I underclassed her skills, because Q gets her feet on a nearby table and vaults backwards over my shoulder, dragging me off-balance now, flipping me a dozen feet to go crashing into an abandoned table service cart loaded with dirty dishes and cutlery. By the time the crash is finished and I’m airborne, that incarnation has disappeared once more and I have about a second to scan John Crane gasping still in pain and shock at his broken wrist and Tiger doggedly trying to work her way free, then there’s the curiously suggestive inrushing of air as three more Q clones come to the fore.
The women are identical. One wields a deadly-looking shimmering garrote, the others no noticeable weapons at all, though after a moment I see the third Q’s costume includes metal sheaths in the otherwise de rigueur elbow-length leather gloves which she uses as cudgels, delivering a quick combo of forearm strikes and Muay Thai knees I hasten to defend, backing away and tipping over tables to stall the others.
“This is bullshit, you know,” I say and let her hit me in the middle of the chest the same moment I light up like a Christmas tree, the shock flinging the comely assassin back twenty yards where she lays on the carpet unmoving a moment before winking out of existence.
“Stop trying to kill me,” I growl as I round on the woman with the garrote, too wise to this move to even think about defending with my own arms, grabbing a chair I prod at her like a lion tamer, vaguely sickened and astonished to see the garrote wire glimmer with the deadly blue of a nano-filament before the chair falls to the ground in a variety of different-sized chunks.
“Just doing our job, Zephyr,” the other Q says, rapidfire kicks and then a few punches from the other side.
“That’s right,” the garrote-wielder says. “You should look to your own behavior. It’s clear you peed off someone with a lot of clout.”
“‘Peed off’?” I remark. “You really just said that?”
For a moment I am too clever by half, thinking I’m going to play off these two sisters poised either side of me, but they ken to that ploy pretty quickly, backing away, and I realize just in time, leaving me an open target to the returned archer who continues to roam about. Looking past her, I am mildly distressed to see a TV camera crew jostling in the doorway like they’re in a war zone, which I guess from their rarefied perspective they are. If I didn’t have so
much on my plate I’d EMP the suckers just to be a killjoy.
But this is going down the same way as last time, and present events tell me this shit is just gonna keep happening unless I can incapacitate the ringleader of these quantum killers – or, you know, solve whoever’s behind it all trying to kill me, not that I have a clue where to start.
Crane reaches for his service pistol again and cops a sweet back-hander from the kung fu Q while I continue to back away, tracking across the barn-like, now deserted restaurant. The archer appears and fires and I dodge aside, grinning insanely and taking her moment to reload as my opportunity to turn tail and run.
*
I DIVE THROUGH the windows overlooking the street, needlessly rolling across the sidewalk and sending the massed crowds outside teeming backwards, everyone suddenly not so fucking eager to get up and close to one of the city’s most famous sons.
I never see the other Qs inside again. I guess it’s easier to call in more reinforcements, because that’s what happens, five of the svelte intruders flipping and yipping out of the great nowhere, each one armed with a calamity of greater and more elaborate weapons until the fifth one lugs an honest to God motherfucking chainsaw, albeit cut down for her size and wielded with surgical precision.
“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” I sigh. “This is bullshit.”
“This is business,” three of the women say at once.
The next few moments I am fighting for my very existence. Ducking and weaving. A leaden whip shatters car windows. I block high kicks to my face, eyes clenched shut like against a locust plague as I blindly grab one of the Qs and throw her as far as I can, throwing off a choke hold from another and pouring volts into my assailant. I know I can get free of this mess now any time I choose by simply taking to the air, but that’s going to solve nothing. My elbow pummels in the face of one of the masked lovelies, blood spattering the footpath as I block a sai strike to the throat, turn the wrist away, stomp on someone’s foot and try the elbow trick again only to have her foil me, clutching my arm, putting the joint into a lock and twisting me off-balance, throwing me into the one with the chainsaw who I blast at close quarters at the last instant, thus saving myself from imminent death by detruncation.
“Get off of me!” I cry, murdering grammar as well as nearly doing the same to the three assassins clinging on at that very moment as I light myself up with an overabundance of charge, the trio vanishing at the moment of their unconsciousness like the others.
Desperately, I cast about for sight of the one directing all this: the one who must be the “prime” the others obey, provided such a being even exists. But – between the growing number of TV cameras, the hordes of onlookers surging forward into peril one moment, crush backwards the next, a half-dozen beat cops valiantly trying to maintain public safety, and John Crane staggering from the bistro bloody-nosed and panting, gun swinging about wildly – I am damned if I can see the woman in question.
“This is bullshit,” I sob this time, almost entirely to myself.
And look around.
Red-clad assassins emerge from between the crowded onlookers. Dozens of them. Each one wearing a grin more calculating and cruel than the last.
“Oh God damn it alright,” I say, defeated.
I do the crouch thing and get the hell out of there.
Zephyr 18.2 “Secret Identity”
WITHOUT ME AS the lure, the Qs have no reason to remain. I’m doing the greatest service to public safety simply by removing myself from the equation – however much I might still be putting it at future risk leaving this situation unresolved.
I get a little altitude, thinking if nothing else to clear my head, and with the city tumbling by beneath wispy clouds below, I hear my name shouted and whirl about ready to fend off more attackers, but instead the compact black-clad streak headed for me is my daughter Windsong. Her ever-lengthening auburn hair whips behind her like a contrail, face alight with the joy of flight we share. Enough to make me grin, despite the circumstances, though the moment Tessa hauls up beside me above the cloud bank, her face contorts into a more familiar look of petulant female anger.
“I’ve been calling you,” she says.
“Calling me because you’re still pissed about the raid thing or because you want to spend some quality time together?”
“The former,” she growls. “I heard it ended upstate with some kind of alien manifestation, like an alien god or something going berserk? It sounded epic! Hell yes I’m pissed.”
“You shouldn’t be,” I say, voice curdled in that faux fatherly patience thing I’ve pulled off for so many years. “The idea was to keep you safe.”
“You know I’m getting sick of you trying to keep me in cotton wool even though I’ve been out on my own for a year now,” she replies.
Hoping a little fable about my own woes might stifle her enthusiasm for risk, I quickly sketch the troubles two thousand feet below us and Tessa adopts an appropriately daughterly expression of concern and well-meaning.
“Don’t you think you should be doing something about it, if someone’s put a price out on your life, dad?”
I dig out my Enercom phone while explaining, “Someone’s also stolen a journalist’s dossier. His zee files. Presumably all about yours truly.”
“You think they’re linked?” she asks, us both still hovering.
I nod, then call up the photo I took some time earlier.
There’s a few tasks I am pleased to say I’ve crossed off the list, but some priorities remain, and I show them to my daughter:
1. Avenge my mother’s murder.
2. Get custody of Tessa.
3. Kill Arsenal.
4. Find Loren.
5. Find somewhere to live.
6. Who is Strummer?
7. Look for the King/101ers.
Windsong blinks back at me, expression dubious, the domino mask giving an adult sheen to her broad face.
“‘Get custody of Tessa’? How’s that going for you?”
“Your mother agreed to custody if I could find you. Good enough for me.”
“She . . . did?”
I oops myself at realization of another loose end not properly tied off. Hundreds of feet above the churning city below, my daughter hangs her head, very adult frustrations writ across her youthful countenance. I move closer in sympathy, but she throws my comforting hand off, turning instead and powering away a hundred feet, leaving me to give chase, which I do, surprised now as I draw closer to see not tears but a hesitant, beaming smile of relief.
“She really said yes?”
“She really said yes,” I answer. After a moment’s ex-partner guilt, I add, “Your mom really loves you, honey. She only wants you safe in her own way too.”
“You never stopped me being Windsong. She wanted to.”
“I don’t know that makes me the better person.”
Tessa looks as if she was going to say something else, but freezes, my response sinking in, morphing its way through her features to a thoughtful nod.
“Come with me,” she says. “I’ve got some good news of my own.”
*
FATHER AND DAUGHTER, we rocket across the city, taking only moments to complete what would be a one-hour commute for the ground-locked plebians below. I follow Tessa to one of a hundred anonymous rooftops in the Bohemian quadrant of Grant, down a fire escape and quickly slip in through an open window into a sparse but tastefully decorated flat.
“Hang on,” I say, trepidation resonant in every word. “Who’s place is this?”
“It’s mine.”
I stop. Stare. Stare again. Turning my daughter over in my mind from newfound angles, though still I don’t get it, which I guess shows, Tessa laughing and never looking as much like her wild-haired mother at any other point than in that moment before she reels herself in, an almost self-conscious, owlish look on her pretty face.
“It’s mine. Stop staring. Take a seat.”
“I assumed
you were staying with the Wallachians. . . ?”
“Yeah, no,” she replies. “I mean, yeah, I was, but things have got a bit weird up there. You know, weirder than usual, I mean.”
“Like?”
“The Wallachians are wrapping us up. The Sentinels.”
“Really? Why?”
“Well, you know, they were always there to support the Seeker, and the Seeker, she kind of got, um, cosmically indisposed, as you sorta know, so. . . .”
“I didn’t get Seeker killed.”
“No, I know that,” Tessa says quickly. “You banged the Seeker and so a fourteen-year-old girl got drafted by the powers of some ancient prophecy and died in her place.”
“Jesus, honey –” I say and can say no more, floored, so I slump into the thrift store sofa beneath a window festooned with gay little flower pots.
Acting oblivious is just another of the subtle barbs she’s learnt at her mother’s knee. Tessa moves into a bare bones kitchen, explaining she’s sharing the place with teammate Syzygy since they’re teenage girls in similar circumstances and recently made, if not homeless, at least very, very uncomfortable staying on at the mad monks’ largesse.
“And how are you paying the rent?” I ask slowly, father’s resilience in my ability to carry on, and also in asking the question, terrified what the answer might be.
“With this,” she says and emerges furnishing a letter.
*
“A BOOK DEAL?” I say in disbelief about three-point-four seconds later.
“Seriously? A book deal? You’ve been alive about ten minutes. How the fuck can they be offering you a book deal?”
“Gee thanks a bunch, pops,” Tessa says in that paradoxically completely unaffected way of hers as she takes the letter back and reads it with a joyous look, I am guessing, for about the zillionth time.
“I’m a pretty hot property at the moment, I’ll have you know.”
“Jesus,” I remark again. “No one ever offered me a book deal. Fuck.”
Zephyr Box Set 2 Page 43
