"Man, you are so full of shit. And don't call me Agnes." The woman, who was apparently not called Agnes, stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit it.
Karen coughed and looked pointedly at the "No Smoking" sign.
"Can it, sweetheart, I work here. You wanna complain, go talk to the mayor."
"Where can I find the mayor?" Karen retorted, not one to be intimated by another hardass with a punk attitude.
"I am the mayor, sweetie." The woman stood up from behind the desk, revealing the rest of her outfit, which consisted of long jeans and hiking boots. She extended her hand. Karen took it and they did the firm "I respect you" handshake. "Call me Rose."
"Rose, nice to meet you." Karen indicated the mayor's lapel pin. "What unit is that?"
Rose gave her an approving look. "Good eye. 720th Military Police Battalion, out of Fort Hood. Did ten years, four deployments, and then got out and moved up here." She tapped her smoke, dropping ash on the already-stained floor. "You serve?"
"Not in the military."
"OGA?" Rose snorted. "Oh wait, you could tell me but … all right, enough bullshit. You wanna go see this guy, we're going to have to make it quick. This one's a little sticky."
"Sticky? Sticky how?" Karen asked. Behind her, Calix paid only cursory attention to the conversation. Instead, she looked around unobtrusively, observing everything–the placement of exits, the number of cars in the parking lot. She caught me watching and shrugged.
"Let me put it this way. I've had a shit ton of bullshit coming down the pike, requesting cooperation with this Black Mountain outfit." Rose spat on the floor, indicating her opinion of what people could do with that request. "Then, yesterday, these federal assholes show up, kick me and my people out of my office, and decide they're going to take over the place."
"Can they do that?" Why did I ask? I would have preferred to stay comfortably off her radar.
"Of course they can, asshole." I assumed Rose used these epithets as terms of endearment. "Who's going to stop them? There's me and the Sheriff and one whole deputy. If we add in the dogcatcher, we'd have a whole army to take them on." She rolled her eyes.
A noise came from around the corner. Rose stubbed out her smoke. "Come on, let's go before someone asks me why the circus is in town."
She led the way outside and around the back of the building. The medical examiner's office was accessible via a separate entrance. As we waited for her to unlock the door with an actual key, Calix finally spoke up.
"What assholes?"
Rose paused from jiggling the key in the lock. "Could you be a little more specific, honey?"
"You said, ‘these federal assholes,'" Calix said. "Who are they?"
"I did say that." Rose gave up trying to fiddle with the lock. "Stand back." We moved out of her way. She stepped back, then forward again. As she did so, she landed a solid kick, right in the middle of the lock plate. The door popped open. "Come on in. That door sometimes sticks so you gotta help it along."
"I'd like to have had her on my breaching team back in Tal Afar," Calix muttered to me as she passed me to file inside with Karen.
"You coming?" I paused inside the door. Randall had made no move to follow.
"No way, man," he said. "I don't need to see that when I'm trying to go to sleep at night."
Fair enough. I followed the women inside, closing the door in time to hear Rose answer Calix's question.
"They said they were FBI," she said, flipping on a series of light switches. Fluorescents flickered on, humming overhead as they started to get brighter. "I called this morning once I got in, tried to find out what the hell was going on, but all I got was some puke in a suit telling me they can't comment on an ongoing investigation." She disappeared inside a small closet, then came back out holding a box of face masks. "So much for fucking professional courtesy, right? Assholes. I put in a request for more info, but I'm still waiting for them to call me back. Whatever, I'm not holding my breath. You want one of these?"
Karen and Calix each took one. I turned her down. That's not how my nose works.
"All right. We're going to go in there, you're going to take a look, tell me if it's your friend, and then you're going to piss off out of here, got it?"
We nodded all around.
"Why did you get out after ten years?" Calix's question stopped Rose momentarily. "You were halfway to retirement. Why not just finish it out and get your money?"
Rose brushed her chin with her fingers, as if unconsciously groping for a smoke. "Army?"
The look of horror on Calix's face. Heh. "Marines." I swear she sniffed.
"Huh." Rose shrugged. "I left on my own terms with no regrets." She cast an eye around three of us. "Can you say the same?"
Didn't realize my head was that easy to get into, but somehow her words lodged in my head like an earworm, winding around and around as we followed her into the back room.
∞ ∞ ∞
John Tell and I had had a complicated past. He'd sold me out, but before he did, he'd been a teammate and someone I'd had to trust with my life. Hell, we'd even shared drinks after beating the shit out of each other. Which is as close to a bro moment as I'd come in a long time before meeting Randall.
There had been an unexplained bitterness underlying his laser focus on the mission. Glimpses of something he'd only ever let out one time at the bottom of a Pilsner glass, and then shut down.
He'd died a hard death. A death someone who had once been a soldier didn't deserve. The first time we'd met, he'd grinned at me through the bars of the cage. Whatever had caught up with him had left the same grin, twisted in a rictus across a face that displayed unimaginable pain.
"I'll be outside." I couldn't stay inside. Karen didn't answer. She bent over Tell's body, observing. Calix's expression remained neutral, but she nodded.
It was Rose who followed me outside into the snow, patted my back as I lost every bit of my breakfast against the side of the building, and held me so I wouldn't sink to my knees in the middle of the mess.
She pulled me to the other side of the building, away from the door. It didn't help. I could still smell the decay even from outside the morgue.
"Good, buddy?" She pulled her pack of smokes out of her suit jacket, tapped two out, and handed me one.
At first, I waved it off. I hadn't had a smoke since the Cold War.
"Are you sure?" She left it out in front of me.
"Yeah, you know what? Thanks." I accepted a cigarette. She used her lips to pull the other one out of the pack, then took a lighter out of her pocket.
She lit my smoke, then hers. The first drag made me cough, but I took another one, and then another, and then I was back in the habit. It didn't make me want to run right out and buy a pack of my own, but for a moment it gave me something to do. And it deadened the smell, somewhat.
"No, no he wasn't."
"Sorry?" She raised an eyebrow.
"He wasn't a real good buddy." The memory of his betrayal stung deep, the attack in Germany that had left Karen and I at the mercy of Gratusczak and his mad science.
But there was also the time we'd shared drinks. And the shared experience of being O.C. sprayed by Karen. And training together. When Karen had told me he'd been a cop in New York.
The cigarette was in danger of going out. I took another drag. What lay in the morgue told a story of someone who had made some wrong decisions but had received something far beyond justice for his sins.
"There was a kid in my platoon, real asshole," Rose began. "Didn't do shit unless you were standing right over him, telling him exactly what to do, making sure he did it." She stubbed out her cigarette and fished for her pack. "That kid … you know the saying, ten percent of your troops are going to take ninety percent of your effort?"
I'd never heard the saying. But the concept was familiar. Before MONIKER had gotten its hands on me, I'd worn a uniform in the service of my country. Different country. Different uniform. But soldiers have more in common with each o
ther than many civilians would like to think. No matter what side they were on.
"Anyway," Rose continued. Not sure if she was talking for my benefit or hers. "One day, we're heading out to patrol a village. Just a little cordon and knock, say hi, do some community liaison shit." She coughed and spit. "No wait, it was a well opening. Or something like that. Whatever, doesn't matter. We were out, on our way, and we got hit."
She said it simply, without a lot of drama. But I knew what she meant.
"Bad?"
"Yeah. Real bad." Rose let the cigarette burn for a little while. "This kid … didn't make it. I mean, he got hit right off the bat. No chance for redeeming heroics, no chance for anyone to get to him. Just boom. Dead."
A car passed out on the road, sporting the Black Mountain logo. She watched it as it sped away. After it had left, she took another drag.
"Well, the rest of us got it together, suppressed the attack, withdrew, did all the right things. I mean, by this time, we were about six months in. We knew what we were doing, had all the right reactions, if there were a fucking textbook, you'd see our damn platoon was in it."
Rose shook her head. "His death messed more people up than the other soldier we lost. Why was that?" She answered her own question. "People didn't know how to mourn. I mean, I wanted to cry. I'd lost a fucking troop." She swiped at her eyes with the palm of her hand. "But I felt like a fucking hypocrite, too, right? Like, I'm an asshole, because I'm fucking sad and pissed, and I never fucking liked that guy when he was alive."
She cracked her neck, blinking, then stubbed out her cigarette. "Shit."
"Yeah." There wasn't much to add.
Randall came around the corner of the building. "Hey, you guys–where's the others? Still inside?"
In answer, Karen and Calix emerged from the building, looking around for us.
"Over here!" Randall called.
I let the cigarette fall to the ground and stubbed it out. The temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees, enough to become really uncomfortable, even for me. As Karen shook hands with Rose, thanking her for her help, I tucked my hands under my armpits to keep them warm.
The change drifted across my mind. Zap. I jumped. Stupid cuff. I was just thinking about it for crying out loud.
Zap.
Jesus Christ.
"Calix, why don't you run Randall back to his car?" Karen spoke, interrupting my private game of Operation. "Rick and I will meet you at the place. I'll text you the reservation info. Get Dmitri. We're going to need to game plan this out."
Calix raised her eyebrow again, threw me a glare, then gathered up Randall and started heading back. He was talking her ear off before they made it more than ten yards.
"I'd better be heading back to my desk," Rose said. "The good people of this shithole don't pay me to sit around showing tourists the sights."
"Thank you very much for your assistance, Mayor," Karen said.
"Any time," Rose responded. "You need anything else, stop on by."
"Really?" I asked.
"I'm being polite," she said. "Actually, fuck off."
I laughed and shook her hand. "Thanks for the smoke."
"Good luck," she replied, holding her other hand over mine for a split second before relaxing her hold. "I mean that."
∞ ∞ ∞
Karen was silent until we were out earshot, then: "Seems like you made a friend."
"She was enabling my smoking habit."
She side-eyed me. "You don't have a smoking habit."
"That you know about." That earned me a small quirk at the side of her mouth. It might have been trying to be a smile.
"Hit you, too." Karen's face remained stoic. No sign except her words that she'd felt anything outside clinical detachment standing over Tell's mangled remains.
"Yeah." If it helped her for me to admit it. "Yeah. He was an asshole, but he was a partner for a short time, and no one deserves a death like that."
"Yeah." She blew out her breath, swinging her arms, shaking out the tension. "So, what did you find out?"
"The mayor likes to smoke and tell war stories."
"Not that, dick." Karen didn't smile, but it kind of felt good for her to call me a dick. Meant she still maintained part of herself, somewhere in there. "What did you learn from his body?"
I shivered. The cold reached under my skin with its long, bony fingers.
"He died scared," I said. "They worked him over for a while." The scent of dried urine had been overpowering; she had probably noticed it. What she wouldn't have realized, discerned, were the subtle differences that told the story of losing control of his bladder, drying, then again, and again. Someone had tortured him and not let him go for a long time before he'd died.
"And?" Karen's voice was cold and tight.
"Someone was treating him in between sessions–I could smell the antiseptic and the bandages. Not sure if it was the guy questioning him, or whatever killed him."
"You couldn't tell?"
I shook my head. "It's weird. I can get all this … pain. Blood." The change nudged up against me. I searched for the right words to explain how I knew what I knew. It wasn't just the smells I could pull up–I'm not a fucking Basset hound. It came from more than that. It stemmed from the same energy that powered the change, guided my senses.
And what Tell's body told me was much more than the fact that he'd pissed his pants.
A sense void hovered over Gratusczak. The man not only didn't have a scent, he was surrounded by a sense vacuum.
Standing near John had plunged me into the weirdest sense of déjà vu, as some of Gratusczak's void had drifted over me. I didn't know what it meant. It made sense, I guess. He'd dealt with the doctor before, but that had been almost a year ago.
"Anything else?"
"Whatever did that wasn't an animal," I told her. "Not sure if it was human."
"That's less than helpful."
A horn honked two short blasts somewhere in front of us. Our vehicle headed toward us, Calix behind the wheel. She pulled up next to us and popped up the locks.
The windows were up, thanks to the cold. Karen moved to get in the car, and I placed my hand on her arm. She recoiled, and I stepped back. Quickly.
"There was one other thing, don't know how helpful it'll be."
"Yeah?"
"Whoever he was hanging out with, smelled of shitty cognac."
"Could he have been drinking it?"
"Nah, it wasn't that, it was … more like someone who drank it regularly rubbed up against him. Like, carrying him, or escorting him."
Karen nodded. "Intel is intel." She went to open the door again.
"Karen–"
She stopped.
"What?"
"What's going to happen with his … remains?" I touched my St. Jude medal. They'd given it back to me with my belongings. Everything except my damn notebook.
For just a moment, her face softened. "I think he had family in New York. MONIKER will reclaim the body. We'll find some polite fiction to give them with his remains."
At that moment, Calix rolled down a window. "Will you two get in the car? I'm getting a crick in my neck trying to eavesdrop."
That was the last time Karen and I spoke of our old partner. I'd like to say I never see his savaged face when I close my eyes, but if I did, it would be a lie.
CHAPTER TWELVE
From the way Karen had said it, I'd thought she'd either rented someplace, or gotten us a hotel room. It turned out to be somewhere in between. She'd found the place Tell had rented in town, and the fact he'd paid up in rent until the end of the month, and so Calix had gone over there, pretended to be Tell's girlfriend here in town after hearing about the awful tragedy that had befallen her true love, and presto! We had a key and a place to stay, and nobody knew we were there.
"Surprised they didn't lock this place down," I said, stepping over the raised threshold. "Crime scene and all."
"Not really," Karen said. "His body was found miles f
rom here. They probably gave it a quick search, removed anything incriminating, and forgot about it."
It felt beyond weird to be there in the place Tell had been living. And yet, almost nothing in there indicated he had ever stepped foot in the place.
The apartment was a room with a bath that had been part of a larger house. Someone had walled off the connecting door, so we had a modicum of privacy. I couldn't find a stove, but a counter ran along part of one of the walls, and he'd set up a hot plate and electric kettle. A mini-fridge underneath completed the kitchen set-up. I wondered how everyone would react if I checked it for a beer. Hm.
Aside from the bed, there was a table with two chairs set up around it, and a desk with another chair. We gathered around the table, leaving one of us the odd man out.
Normally I would have had no problem stretching out on the bed and letting them plan our tactical approach, especially since Karen usually did the planning. Her plans were always smart and practical, and all I needed was for her to point me in the right direction.
However, I'd rather hop back on Gratusczak's lab table than John Tell's empty bed. And also, while I still trusted Karen, her instincts were shot.
"All right, let's figure this out." Karen pulled a tablet out of her bag and laid it on the table where everyone could see. She placed a wireless mouse and keyboard in front of her.
Dmitri took the second chair. Calix pulled up the third, flipped it around, and straddled it, resting her folded hands on the table. "What have we got?"
Guess that left me odd man out. I wasn't about to stand, hovering over someone's shoulder. I decided to sit down and rested against the wall. With any luck, they'd forget I was there, and I could catch a nap. Or keep trying to get this damned cuff off my wrist.
"Our primary mission is to find Maria," Karen said. "As Mr. Nicolaiov has shared with us, latest intel points to a branch, or some kind of subsidiary of this firm, Black Mountain."
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