The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  Detective Anaka just about flat out said that all the corrupt forces in the city government were conspiring to pin Byron’s murders on the two punks. Dr. Ellis said Byron got clawed by a moreau, covered the fact up, and disappeared.

  And Byron worked for VanDyne Industrial.

  What the hell did that mean?

  What could a Brit fox named Byron Dorset be doing for one of the major stockholders in the San Francisco civic machine?

  And what was he doing on Eddy Street? Was he really going to meet a bunch of bald schizo pinks in their own apartment? If so, why’d he get whacked by a morey?

  Anaka was right, this was all his job. She wasn’t equipped to do any half-assed investigating. She was just a piece of street trash from Cleveland who barely had enough smarts to keep her hide intact. Just thinking about all of this made her head hurt.

  The only person she knew who was equipped to unravel something like this was down in Los Angeles behind a blockade of moreaus and National Guard. Even then, she’d be lucky if Nohar remembered her.

  So, was she going to sit on her ass and wait until she talked to Anaka again?

  “Yeah, right,” Angel said with all the sarcasm she could muster. Okay, skulking into other people’s buildings was a bad idea. But she’d be damned if she stopped trying to figure things out. Even if she was a half-assed investigator, she was the only one she could trust.

  Besides, she had to straighten out Byron’s affairs. If certain questions came up in the process, no one could blame her for asking—right?

  The dryer came on for a few minutes and then Lei came out of the shower. “It’s all yours.”

  Angel grunted a monosyllable.

  Lei leaned forward and rubbed noses. “I understand, but you could try and relax a little bit.”

  “I’ll try,” Angel said as she shrugged out of her wet clothes.

  Chapter 9

  San Francisco awoke to a positively ugly morning. The sky was asphalt black. The wind was trying to shake the windows apart. A hazy fog evolved into rain so heavy that Angel could barely see across the street out her bay window.

  As far as Angel was concerned, the weather was the least ugly part of her day. She made the mistake of waking up for work, eating an abbreviated breakfast, and driving down to Ralph’s to start her shift—all pretending that last week hadn’t happened.

  She should have known better. In a universe that allowed her to drive up to Ralph’s Diner in a hundred K worth of BMW, nothing could be normal. As she drove toward the diner, she could see something odd was going on, even through the rain. There was too much traffic hovering around, especially for this early—Ralph’s never had much of a breakfast crowd—and way too many cars for this weather.

  Angel roiled past without stopping. She could read the logo of several news services. She pulled to the curb and played with the expensive comm set into the dash. She punched up the BaySatt news feed, and there was Daniel Pasquez, male Hispanic archetype, doing the live feed from Ralph’s.

  “Great.”

  So much for trying to lead a normal life.

  She pulled the BMW over at the crest of a hill. She flipped a few switches on the dash, and the small screen of the BMW’s built-in comm activated for outgoing calls.

  Having a car with a full comm unit, that she could get used to.

  She called in sick to Ralph’s.

  The response was typical Sanchez. “Why aren’t you here?”

  “I’m not coming in.”

  Sanchez did not looked pleased. “What do you mean, ‘not coming in’? Where’re you calling from—?” Angel could see lights behind Sanchez; they were covering his little manager office. What did Sanchez think he was doing?

  “I mean I am not coming in. And where I’m calling from is none of your business.”

  “Damn it, what do I tell these reporters?”

  Angel just stared at the screen. Was this greaseball serious? “What?”

  “You’re just going to blow this opportunity—”

  Damn it. Sanchez was serious. All he saw in all this was a chance to get some free advertising. The fact that this was her life that was being screwed with didn’t seem to occur to him. Either that, or he assumed the sad proposition that his every employee lived and breathed that lickspittle job as much as I’m-the-manager-and-have-no-life did.

  “You’re right, Sanchez. I shouldn’t call in sick.”

  He looked visibly relieved. “Thank—”

  “I quit.”

  “What?” The look on Sanchez’s flabby face was almost worth the months of irritation she’d endured.

  “I said I quit. I’m tired of your flab-ass dimestore greasepit. I’m sick of getting shafted on hours because you’re boffing Judy. I’m sick of someone who only serves moreys because humans wouldn’t stand him. Go wait on tables yourself—your customers will fucking love you.”

  To make everything clear, she gave him the finger and hit the mute button. It was wonderful to watch, even without the sound. Sanchez’s face went red, and he began shouting at her, spraying the screen. It was nearly ten seconds before he seemed to realize that he was coming down on her in front of reporters.

  So much for his free publicity. Angel knew that if the reporters couldn’t get hold of her, they’d be perfectly willing to give airtime to her manager throwing a rod.

  She killed the comm and turned the car around to go home.

  It was an odd feeling. She had never thought she’d miss that job, of all the shit places to work she’d been in, but her sudden unemployment worried her. Another part of her life she’d thought stable had crumbled so rapidly that she was still coming to grips with what she’d done when she got back to her apartment.

  The calls started around eight, about the time she got back home.

  At nine, reporters were calling every ten minutes.

  After a while, the opportunity to bitch the media leeches out was outweighed by the annoyance factor and by 10:30, she just told the comm to lock out all the incoming calls.

  Amidst the forest of reporters, a few calls came from moreaus. All of those ended up being representatives of Father Collor and his people. They wanted her to think about nonhuman solidarity. She told them all to fuck off.

  One call came from a bald human. He only stayed on screen long enough to say: “We know who you are.”

  The news off the comm wasn’t much better once she got over the novelty of seeing her ex-manager getting it over the public net. There’d been a half-dozen incidents of cross-species violence in the city overnight, primarily concentrated in Chinatown during a power failure. There had only been one minor injury, but property damage was estimated at fifty thousand dollars. The vids panned down a street of broken storefronts, and one taxi that had the windows busted out.

  They said that the incidents were probably the result of the suspected arson of The Rabbit Hole.

  At noon, she killed the comm entirely.

  They were going to release Byron’s body today. DeGarmo wanted to hear about funeral arrangements, too—

  “Ahh, shit.”

  She didn’t want to do this. But it had fallen on her head, and who was she kidding if she said she had something better to do? Better she do this than let it fall to someone who wanted to use it to make some political point.

  And she’d be damned if she let that happen.

  She turned the comm back on and called DeGarmo.

  If she’d wanted to, she probably could have orchestrated the entire procedure over the comm. Somehow, that wouldn’t have felt right. She had no desire to see Byron’s corpse again, but she didn’t think she could let him pass from St. Luke’s unaccompanied. DeGarmo offered to supervise things for her. But, in the end, there was no way she could stay at home.

  So, at 3:30 she met DeGarmo in the parking lot of St. Luke’s Veterinary.r />
  When Angel drove the BMW into the half-flooded parking lot, she saw DeGarmo for the first time in the flesh—a tall human, wearing a black trench coat that shone from the rain sheeting off of it. He hung back in the halo cast from sodium lamps mounted next to the ambulance bays. His hair was a matte-black crew cut that enhanced the thinness of a too-lean face.

  Angel got out of the car and made for the shelter of the ambulance bays. It wasn’t until she was up next to the lawyer that she realized exactly how tall he was. His waistline was just about eye level on her.

  DeGarmo was holding out his hand by the time she reached him. Angel shook it with both of hers.

  “I’m pleased to finally meet you in person, Miss Lopez.”

  “Call me Angel,” she told him. “I’m sick of ‘Miss Lopez.’ Ain’t mine, the INS picked it for my grandmother.”

  DeGarmo gave a noncommittal shrug. “We need to get your authorization to move the body. Then we can go to—” DeGarmo looked at a small palm-held computer. “Cabrillo Acres Funeral Home.”

  He looked up from the computer. “Can I ask why all the way down in Pacifica?”

  “First place I called that handled moreaus.”

  DeGarmo led her into the building where a group of paramedics were standing around a u-shaped desk. As they approached, Angel asked DeGarmo, “How’d you end up in this? What’s your angle?”

  “Mr. Dorset retained me to handle this.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “Don’t worry, none of it is from the current estate.”

  “So when do I have to pay you something?”

  “As long as it involves the settling of Mr. Dorset’s affairs, you don’t.”

  What kind of estate were they talking about? She’d avoided asking DeGarmo about that because it seemed tacky. She wondered about it all the way through the authorization procedure. Then there was the fact Byron did all this bequeathing to her in the thirteen days prior to his death.

  DeGarmo acted as if that was normal.

  Once she’d satisfied the bureaucracy, they rolled out a gurney with the sheeted body on it. It smelled of cold rot and disinfectant. It made Angel cringe inside. There was a ground ambulance waiting for the drive to Pacifica. Angel and DeGarmo flanked the body as the medics rolled it toward the waiting meat wagon.

  “You can ride down with me,” DeGarmo offered.

  Angel shook her head. “I’ll go with him.” She patted one of Byron’s sheeted hands—

  “Hold it,” she said.

  “What?” DeGarmo and two medics said simultaneously.

  Angel took in a deep breath. She smelled wet fur, blood, disinfectant—and something smelled wrong about the body. And there was something radically wrong with the shape of the hand under the sheet.

  “Lift the sheet.”

  “Do you really want to do that?” asked the medic pushing the gurney. She was a Hispanic woman, and her young human face had a look of concern on it. “I don’t think you—”

  “I need to see him.” There was a terrible sinking feeling in Angel’s gut. “Lift the sheet, now.”

  The four of them stood at the points of the compass around the body, blocking the door to the ambulance bay. The Hispanic medic gave a questioning look to her partner, who shrugged. She shook her head, as if she thought it was a really bad idea, and lifted the sheet.

  “What the hell kind of fuckup is this?” Angel screamed at the medic, before she’d even taken her hand off of the sheet.

  It wasn’t Byron. It wasn’t even a fox.

  Laying under the sheet was the body of a brown-furred canine who looked like he had taken a shotgun blast to the neck.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Angel yelled.

  The Hispanic woman covered the body again and reached out for her. “Please, it’s just some sort of mixup. I’m sure we’ll be able to—”

  The other medic practically ran back to the desk and picked up a receiver and began talking rapidly to someone.

  Angel shrugged away from the woman. “Damn straight it’s a mixup. Jesus-mother-humping-tap-dancing-Christ, you lost him.” Angel backed up and turned to the lawyer. “Can you sue these shitheads?”

  At the sound of that, the nurse running the station got on another receiver and began talking to someone. The medic pulled the gurney and the unidentified corpse back into the hospital.

  DeGarmo tried to calm her. “I’m sure this will be resolved in a few minutes.”

  “I don’t like this shit,” she said. “Too many people are fucking with me! Byron’s been on the comm more times than the president and they lost him. What’re they running here? What? Just because he’s a morey means he’s fucking interchangeable?”

  They stuck her and DeGarmo in an empty waiting room and it took half an hour for the hospitals’ chief administrator to come down and “explain” what had happened.

  The guy was a pink, of course, middle-aged, white, fat, bald, and sweating enough to look like he’d just come from the rain. She could smell the stress and fear off of the guy from ten meters away. The man’s emotions were as subtle as a toxic waste dump. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache that seemed to grow whiter as he talked to them.

  “It seems, Miss Lopez, that there was a computer error.”

  “What the fuck happened to—” DeGarmo put a hand on her shoulder to restrain her outburst.

  She knew it was bad, whatever it was, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent the boss down here. And Dr. Varberg—that’s what it said on his ID tag—wouldn’t look like he was about to crap his pants.

  “Byron Dorset’s ID number was transposed with that of another patient, a John Doe gunshot victim. That’s why you picked up the wrong body.”

  Angel sucked in a breath and kept her voice level. “Okay, so what happened to Byron?”

  The room was very quiet. Somewhere out in the hospital a public address system spouted something incomprehensible. It took a long while for the answer to come.

  “John Doe’s body was scheduled—” Varberg paused and rubbed his forehead with a pudgy hand.

  “What happened to the body?” Angel said, getting up from her seat and trying hard to keep an even edge to her voice.

  “It was cremated at 9:30 this morning,” Varberg said quietly.

  The scene froze, DeGarmo seated to Angel’s right, Varberg standing in front of her. The air seemed to hang dead around her, making it hard to breathe. She tried to say something, but it only came out as a squeak.

  “Miss—”

  She shook her head violently and slammed her foot back into the chrome-vinyl chair she’d spent the last half hour sitting in. The chair buckled and bounced halfway up the wall behind it, tearing out a chunk of drywall, Varberg backed away, cowering, as if he expected to be next.

  Angel took a few deep breaths, and looked back at DeGarmo. He had vacated his seat and was staring at the wreckage of Angel’s chair.

  She found her voice. “I’ve got money, right?”

  DeGarmo looked at her and did a good job of regaining his composure. “Yes, I’ve filed the appropriate tax f—”

  “Good. I’m retaining you to talk to this asshole.” She pointed at Varberg. “Get what’s left of Byron. File complaints, charges, whatever it is you do. Make his life hell.” Angel walked to the door and yanked it open. “I’ve got a few calls to make.”

  She left to the sound of DeGarmo saying, “Does the hospital have an attorney I can talk to?” Then the door slammed shut.

  She pushed her way to a public comm in the emergency room. She’d finally had enough bullshit.

  It took her nearly ten minutes to get her call through the various extensions at BaySatt news, but she finally found herself facing a too-perfect Hispanic face.

  With a demonic grin that reawakened the pain in her cheek she asked, “So, Mr. Pasquez, you
want a fucking-A exclusive?”

  • • •

  For close to an hour, Angel vented her spleen at St. Luke’s, the cops who cared for little but busting the Knights, the reporters who were trying to make her life hell, the cops, the Knights themselves, the cops. Father Collor, the cops . . .

  She lost count of how many people she’d piss off if this aired, but for a while it made her feel better.

  • • •

  When 8:30 rolled around, Angel said, “Five million?”

  She and DeGarmo were sitting in a rear booth of Ralph’s, not because Angel was nostalgic, but because it was the closest place to St. Luke’s she could think of—only a few blocks south.

  The press was gone, and the place was occupied by a scattering of soaked moreys huddling in from the rain. DeGarmo was the only human other than Judy. Judy seemed unaware of this morning’s events, and Sanchez was nowhere to be seen.

  Lucky on all points.

  A few rats in one corner turned to look at her when she shouted. Angel thought she recognized the black one.

  DeGarmo nodded. “After estate taxes the net assets that Dorset left you is about a hundred fifty thousand short of five million.” He sipped his coffee impassively, as if he handed news like this to people all the time.

  Angel sat, staring at the lawyer. She should be—she didn’t know what she should be feeling. A cynical part of her mind kept saying she should be shitting a gold brick and bouncing off the ceiling. She’d just struck the lottery, her ship had come in, she was set for life . . .

  The problem was, the news had finally knocked out whatever feeling of stability she had left in her life. If things could change so damn quickly, nothing was certain.

  She must’ve been staring quite a while because DeGarmo lowered his coffee. “Are you all right?”

  Angel blinked. Was she all right? Could she even know if she was all right? “I’m fine, I guess. I need to get my bearings.”