"Who’s paying for this?" Merry said, business mode kicking in. "I don’t like throwing around money to people I don’t know.”
"I'm paying for it," Cameron said before Jayne could answer. Jayne stared at him, not sure if he was being sincere or just a very smooth liar. "Way I see it, getting that guy back behind bars is a public service. Anything I can do to help is worth the effort."
Merry shook her head. "You know what I'm going to say."
"Finding Burrett is more important than building the business, Merry," Jayne replied, her jaw set.
"We can't hunt Burrett if we don't have the business, Jayne!" Merry snapped. "We've been over this."
"Yeah, and I worked the case," Jayne said, bristling. "We got paid. So would you get off my back already?"
"One case isn't enough to—"
"I'm not going to just give up—"
"Hi! Welcome to Berty's!"
Jayne and Merry both shut up abruptly as the waitress, who apparently had been standing there waiting, smiled at them stiffly. "Can I get you guys anything?"
"Uh, can we get the poutine please?" Fred said, returning the waitress's uncomfortable service industry smile. "And if I could get a refill? You want another lemon shandy, Merry?"
"Yeah, whatever," Merry muttered.
"Poutine, another bottle of lite, and one lemon shandy," the waitress repeated before turning to Jayne and Cameron. "And you two?"
"You have that local stout with the pig on the label?" Jayne asked while Cameron squinted at the season section of the extensive drink menu.
"The Urban Island Smog Hog?"
"Yeah, that's it."
"Sorry, that's out of season. We do have the Urban Island High Rise Harlot IPA, or the Abyssal Traveler View From Level Nothing imperial stout. I'm not an IPA fan myself but I hear the Harlot is very smooth. Level Nothing is real dark and bitter and malty, if you're into that. Much better than the Void Cruiser chocolate stout Abyssal Traveler is known for, in my opinion."
"Are those the only local stouts on tap?" Jayne asked, wrinkling her nose.
"Well," the waitress said reluctantly. "There is the Exhaust Fumes Porter from Hundred Level Diver, but frankly I think injecting actual smog into the oven while roasting the malts is a stupid gimmick that does nothing for the flavor and is probably going to kill someone."
"I'll take the Harlot then," Jayne said with a sigh.
"I'll have the same thing," Cameron said, putting the menu aside a little helplessly.
"Not much of a beer drinker?" Jayne asked him as the waitress left.
"Yeah, I really only drink when the guys at the department drag me to one of their cop dives," Cameron said with a shrug. "It’s the type of place that doesn’t have drink menus. You just say 'beer' and they bring you a glass. They tried to offer a lite version once and there was nearly a riot. If you asked for a cocktail in there you'd lose your badge."
"Sounds like a fun place," Jayne said, raising an eyebrow.
"I could take you sometime," Cameron offered with a teasing grin. "You could explain whatever the hell a chocolate stout is to the owner. I bet his head would explode."
"Only if Jayne's didn't first," Merry said a snort. "She's picky as hell about her booze."
"I'm not picky, I'm discerning," Jayne said stiffly.
"By discerning," Merry replied, "she means that she's super fussy about only drinking from local breweries. Ask her why she doesn't like Abyssal Traveler."
Cameron looked at Jayne expectantly and Jayne put her face in her hands with a groan.
"They aren't actually local," she complained without looking up, gesturing with her hands as she grew agitated. "One of the major global brands just bought out an actual local brewery and put a quirky label on it so they can sell to the small batch craft brew crowd! It's like a burger chain just slapped a new logo on the sign and declared themselves a small business! They're charging you extra because they're local and independent but you can go down the street and buy the same thing from the same people for half the price!"
"See?" Merry said while Fred snickered. Cameron hid a slightly bemused smile.
"Wait," Fred said. "I've seen you drinking cheap shitty tequila and stuff before. How is that discerning?"
Jayne rolled her eyes.
"That's because drinking tequila and drinking craft beer serve two completely different purposes," she said. "Craft beer is for when you want to drink something that actually tastes good but all the flavor syrups and shit in cocktails make you nauseous—"
"Or for pretentious people who want to look sophisticated and intelligent but can't afford scotch," Merry cut in.
"That too," Jayne confirmed. "Tequila, meanwhile, is for people who just want to forget their own names and pass out in a corner as quickly and cheaply as possible."
"I'm pretty sure you've shown up at my house with tequila twice this month," Cameron said with a slightly concerned expression.
"It's been a forget-your-own-name-and-pass-out kind of month," Jayne replied casually.
“I think it’s a little hypocritical that you make fun of me for being excited about a thought-provoking show like Neon Generation Excalibur, but it’s okay for you to know all about these beers, which is honestly a much denser mythology.”
The waitress returned with their drinks and Jayne sipped her High Rise Harlot, privately thinking that it wasn't actually too bad, for an IPA.
"Ooh, that reminds me," Fred said. "Did you guys see the new season of Dark Star General Hospital?"
"Oh no," Merry and Cameron said simultaneously.
"Gotta catch up!" Fred pushed. "It was awesome! They're really pushing the show out of its comfort zone, challenging preconceptions about how a show like that should be presented—"
"What?" Merry looked both offended and chagrined that she was being drawn into this. "How could you possibly think that was good? Unless by 'getting out of their comfort zone and challenging preconceptions’ you mean that the season was three episodes long and none of them actually took place in the hospital!"
Cameron looked at Jayne, hoping she'd stop this before it got rolling. Jayne just stared into the distance and silently chugged half of her beer.
"Sorry, Cam," she said as Merry railed against the show's lack of substance and Fred claimed every plot hole was actually a clue pointing to a secret final season. "I've learned my lesson about getting in between them when deep space medical dramas are involved. Especially deep space medical dramas that are about a two-headed doctor who argues with himself about medical ethics."
"You say that like there's more than one," Cameron said. "There can't possibly be more than one deep space medical drama about a two-headed doctor."
"Thanks to my association with these two I am aware of at least three. I'm pretty sure one of them is part of an extended cinematic universe."
Fred took this opportunity to jump in. “Actually, what do you think of this idea, Cameron? A show about a two-headed cop. Like a ‘good cop, bad cop’ deal?”
"Do the two heads ever make out?”
Fred looked disgusted. “No!”
Merry shrugged. “Not interested.”
"Why don’t you create your own two-headed hero show?" Cameron suggested.
"Thanks to this one,” Merry pointed at Jayne, “I don’t have time for any passion projects.”
"You should thank me for saving you from having too many opinions about daytime television," Jayne said, sipping her beer.
Eventually Cameron managed to change the subject by mentioning a space opera that Fred and Merry both despised. As the afternoon wore on to evening, Jayne found herself beginning to relax for the first time in weeks. Comfortably buzzed and tormenting Fred and Merry both with her theory about how Lucino Malatrex was actually the evil mastermind behind the entire series, for a moment she stopped searching every face around her for the one that haunted her dreams.
"I think if I eat one more pretzel I'm going to turn into one," Cameron said eventually as Fre
d offered him the last one on the plate.
"Same here," Jayne agreed, waving it off.
"You ready to call it a night?" Cameron asked. "I was thinking you could walk me home."
Jayne smiled, tossed back the last of her drink, and stood up.
"You sure you want to tap out?" Fred asked as she and Cameron slid out of the booth. "It's still early."
"I've got work tomorrow," Cameron said with a shrug, tapping his phone on the screen set into the end of the table to pay his half of the bill. Jayne noticed he paid for her drinks too, though he didn't say anything about it. "Besides, I'm more of a quiet night in than a party all night guy."
He smiled at Jayne again as he said this.
"I like a night in too," she agreed, leaning closer to whisper. "But it's going to be anything but quiet."
They said their goodbyes and slipped out, Cameron wrapping an arm around her waist as they went.
Fred watched them go, frowning thoughtfully.
Turning to Merry he said, "Do you think they're...?"
Merry shrugged. "Certainly wouldn't be the first time."
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Police Station, L45, Theron Techcropolis, Amaros
"Donut shops?"
By the time Cameron finished transferring Burrett's dossier to the last of the three men standing around his desk, the first was already flipping through it on his own device, frowning at the list of bakeries Burrett was known to frequent in the past. "You really think we're going to find this lunatic buying bear claws?"
The department was bustling that morning, officers hurrying past Cameron's desk on the way to booking drunks, petty crooks, and public streakers. Others squeezed through the throng of officers with thick boxes of evidence. Talk and laughter and the occasional burst of loud indignant noise as an uncooperative suspect was dragged in filled the air and fueled Cameron's headache. He wasn't hung over, but he had definitely stayed up too late. He wasn't sure where Jayne found the stamina considering how little she'd been sleeping lately...
He shook it off, focusing his attention on the men in front of him. The one who'd spoken was the youngest, a desk cop by the name of Ray Taylor. He was thin, young, and hungry for action. Thanks to his shock of red hair he looked like a walking matchstick, and his temper matched. Cameron liked him, and was doing him a favor by giving in to Ray’s constant begging for a real case. Cameron was his only superior willing to look over the one blemish on his record. The blemish no one talked about. But, Cameron had convinced himself, what Ray lacked in experience he made up for in almost manic enthusiasm.
"We don't have a lot to go on," Cameron replied. "This guy is smart, well trained, and he does not want to be found. He's not going to give us a lot to go on, so we need to use every bit of information we've got."
"He's right," said the man next to Ray without looking up from the screen where he was also scanning Burrett's file. He was in his late fifties, tall and broad as a barn, with dark skin and calculating eyes. "A man like this isn't going to just wander in front of a facial recognition scanner and make it easy for us. When you're hunting someone that knows the system, who knows how to stay invisible, it's their habits that give them away every time."
The third man nodded in solemn agreement. He had the look of a boxer gone to seed, with a bent nose, a cauliflower ear and a beer gut hiding the fact that he was still more or less a wall of solid muscle.
"Madison’s right. One time I was tracking down this fella on Canterra Prime that owed me money," he said. "Absolute ghost, known for it. The boys put cash down that I'd never find him. But you know me, Bill the Bulldog. I’m a stubborn sumbitch. Before long I find out he's a regular mama's boy. Visits her grave once a month, regular as clockwork. Next time he pops by to see the old lady, I'm waiting behind the headstone with a blackjack and a bag of quick cement. You should have seen his face when—"
Madison nudged him with his elbow. "Mind your audience, Bill," he said casually, like he was reminding Bill not to swear in front of children. "Maybe this isn’t the best place to be telling that particular story."
"All I meant is," Bill continued, clearing his throat, "everyone has some mundane little routine they hang on to, never thinking it'll lead back to them."
Madison was a former detective with the department who had been pushed into early retirement following a scandal. He wouldn't talk about it, brushing it off as differing opinions over a police report. But judging by the fact that he'd been a paid consultant with the department since before Cameron had joined up, Cameron was guessing it had more to do with interdepartmental politics than Madison's police work.
Bill was officially on the books as a CI, but Cameron had looked into his sealed files the first time they'd worked together. Bill was a former agent, academy trained, who'd been in deep cover for years with a certain organized crime syndicate that had practically owned three cities. That syndicate had collapsed in shockingly abrupt fashion about ten years ago, the leadership seeming to vanish practically overnight. Coincidentally around the same time Bill decided to move to a different planet and take up a new identity. He’d only been back in Theron and with his own name for three years.
Cameron had worked with Madison and Bill many times before and knew they did solid work. He didn't quite trust Bill, but he did trust Madison, and Madison had a skill for keeping Bill mostly contained.
"I'm keeping an eye out in case we get lucky and he does pop up on a facial recognition scan," Cameron said. "He's been out of circulation for a while and we don't know what lasting effects the years in solitary might be having on him. But I'm not counting on that working, which is why I want you guys working any other lead you think might turn something up. Including the donut shops."
"Do you think he's still in the city?" Ray asked.
"Hard to say," Cameron replied. "If he is, it's only because we're watching all the exits. The agent I'm working with has eyes on the bus station, the trains, the sky port, and each and every tollbooth. But I also wouldn't be surprised if he'd found a way to slip past us. Either way, if he's already relaxing on a non-extradition beach somewhere, there's nothing I can do about it. So I'm gonna focus on what I can do, gamble on him still being in town and hope I get lucky."
"So you're putting us on the mother of all long shots is what you're saying?" Madison summarized. "Your best intel is his favorite kind of pastry, and long odds that he's even still planetside?"
"What I'm saying," Cameron began, straightening his tie, "is that anything you can come up with helps, and I think you three are good enough at this to get me something, even with, I'll admit, not much to go on."
"Ah, what do you care how long the odds are?" Bill laughed, slapping Madison on the back. "The man's paying us to camp outside a donut shop!” He popped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “It's a cake job, literally."
"Don't get sloppy," Cameron said, expression serious. "Burrett is dangerous. He's brilliant, unstable, and by now certainly armed. Not that he needs to be. Jayne once told me that the academy makes you memorize place settings for formal dining — salad forks and fish forks and where they go around the plate and all that — and then they make you learn six ways to kill or incapacitate a person with each utensil."
"So don't let Burrett get his hands on an egg spoon," Madison said, pretending to make a note in Burrett’s file. "Got it."
"I think your girlfriend might have been winding you up there, detective," Ray teased.
"No, it's true," Bill assured the younger man. "If you can't set a table for an eight course dinner and also render a man unconscious with a sugar bowl you aren't academy material. Of course, in my day, they made us learn all the social and cultural variants, too. They'd wake you up in the middle of the night shaking cutlery at you and if you couldn't tell them where the caviar spoon goes if you're having afternoon tea in New Paris with a peer two stations above you, the instructor would break one of your fingers."
He shook his hand at Ray for emphasis, his fing
ers calloused and gnarled and crooked from multiple breaks. Ray looked slightly horrified until Bill started laughing. Realizing he was being teased, Ray forced an embarrassed laugh of his own.
"Ah, the academy days," Bill said with a sigh as his laughter trailed off, looking down at his fingers and flexing a particularly badly bent one. "I never did figure out where that damn caviar spoon was meant to go."
Ray blanched.
"Nowhere," Madison provided. "Caviar wouldn't be served during afternoon tea."
"Son of a bitch," Bill said with a sniff. "You learn something new every day."
"Anyway," Cameron said, bringing them back to the subject. "If you spot Burrett, do not approach him. That's an order. You call it in and keep your distance."
"With all due respect," Ray said, leaning over the desk. "Isn't it smarter to try to apprehend him? He's an old man who's been in a government black box for a decade at least. Whatever his training, he can't be that much of a physical threat."
"It's not worth the risk," Cameron said sternly. "It's not just about you not getting hurt. If he spots you coming and rabbits, or gets lucky and slips away because you didn't have backup, then we might lose our only chance to catch him."
Ray frowned, looking ready to dig in and get stubborn about this. "But what if—"
"No." Cameron cut off the young officer as sharply as he could. He could be just as stubborn if that's how Ray wanted to do this. "This guy is hard enough to find already without you tipping our hand just because you want to be the one that brings him in. You spot him, you call it in, and you do not engage."
Ray backed off, though he still looked sullen about it. Cameron ran down a few more of the details with them. As he finished, he noticed Captain Gold heading dead-set in their direction.
Cameron opened his mouth to voice an explanation, but Gold addressed Bill first. “What the hell are you doing?” He pointed at the no smoking sign hanging on the wall.
Bill glared at Gold with his bulldog eyes and snuffed the cigarette in the palm of his own hand, an old party trick.
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