“Please,” Ollie said, but she couldn't loosen her throat enough for the word to come out. She looked from Artur to the door, then down at the lifeless lump that had recently been Ned. He had been nice to her. He had protected her.
And now he was gone.
And it was her fault. She wanted to deny it. She wished it wasn't. But it was her fault. And that was that.
Ollie sniffed. She swallowed.
Then she stepped over Ned's body, and plick-plicked through the puddle of blood until she reached the open door. She waited there for a moment, looking back at everything she was leaving behind.
“I'll just… I’ll go, then. Tell him I’m sorry,” she managed to say, then she stepped through the door, and out into the dark and unfamiliar city.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dan called it in from a payphone in a bar two blocks away. There’d been some sort of break-in. Two victims, both dead. No, he wouldn’t give his name.
He got back in the Exodus and drove off before they could trace the call. He had no interest in dealing with the Tribunal right now. Even if he’d had the time. Which he didn’t.
Twenty minutes later, Dan stood outside an apartment in a run-down block, and thudded his fist against the door with enough force to shake the flimsy walls.
“Steady on there, Deadman. Ye trying to wake the dead, or something?” asked Artur from somewhere near floor level. He winced hard enough to make his envelope outfit crinkle. “Sorry. Didn’t think that through. I know you and Nedran were tight.”
“Right,” said Dan.
“It was insensitive, is what I’m saying.”
Dan nodded.
“Me and me big gob.”
“OK, you can stop now.”
“Right ye are.”
Dan hammered the door again. From beyond it there came the faint but unmistakable hum of a blaster pistol powering on.
He put his weight into a shoulder-charge, tearing the cheap door from its hinges. A bolt of energy crackled across the room, punching a hole in the wall high above Dan’s head, and much, much higher above Artur’s.
Dan clamped a hand over the pistol and wrenched it from the shooter’s hand. Solina, Nona’s mother, stumbled back, her hands over her mouth. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I thought…”
“Forget it,” said Dan, ejecting the battery pack from the gun and tossing both parts onto an armchair. There was a blanket heaped on the floor in front of it, suggesting Solina had been sleeping there, and had jumped up in a hurry.
“Did you…? Did you find her?” the woman asked. She looked past Dan at the open doorway, her hopes visibly fading when she saw it empty. She hurried over to it and looked out, just in case. “Did you find her?” she asked, but her tone told them she already knew the answer.
“Not yet,” said Dan. “But we’re going to. We’ve got a lead.”
“We do?” said Artur. “Aw, deadly. Ye didn’t say. I thought we were coming to give her a refund. Is it the cushion thing?”
Dan and Solina both looked down at him.
“The what?” Dan asked.
“You know, the cushion thing. Wait, didn’t I tell you about the cushion thing?”
Dan shook his head. “No.”
“Ye sure? I thought I had done,” said Artur. “The cushion thing,” he repeated, a little more slowly this time, in case that jogged Dan’s memory.
“What’s the fonking cushion thing?” Dan barked.
“Right, well… Ye sure I didn’t…?” Artur caught the look on Dan’s face and held up his hands. “Alright, alright, steady yerself. Oledol was the one to figure it out, actually. Not that that’s significant, or anything, but thought I’d mention it in the interests of…”
“Artur!”
“Alright, alright. Well, we was looking at the injuries of the other girls—”
“What other girls?” asked Solina. “What cushion thing? What are you talking about?”
“There were three other girls. All called Nona. All sharing the same date of birth,” Dan explained.
Solina’s face crumpled. “And they were injured? How badly?”
“I was about to get to that,” said Artur. He shot her a slightly too reproachful look, then turned his attention back to Dan. “Anyway, you know how he cut the girls open and was rummaging around in their insides?”
“What?” Solina howled. “N-no!”
Dan glared at Artur. He shook his head, just a fraction.
“Uh, a bit, I mean. Just a tiny bit,” Artur said. “Nothing too serious. It was actually kind of…” He fumbled for a suitable word. “…lighthearted,” he said, completely failing to find one. He smiled with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, then went back to talking to Dan. “We think he was looking for something. Something hidden inside one of them.”
Dan’s brow furrowed. “What the fonk does that have to do with cushions?”
“Forget it, don’t matter,” said Artur. “The point is, whatever he was looking for, maybe he’s found it. That’s why the girl – this girl, I mean – hasn’t turned up yet.”
“So what’s he looking for?” Dan wondered.
“Who?” Solina cried. “Who has Nona? Who has my baby girl?”
Dan indicated the armchair. “You should sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down! I want to know where my daughter is!”
Dan chewed his lip. “OK,” he said. “I think her father took her.”
“Her…?” Solina’s eyebrows almost raised all the way off her head. “How could…? Her father’s dead. I told you that. I told you that in your office, weren’t you listening? Janto’s dead. He’s dead.”
“Maybe,” Dan conceded. “How did he die?”
“A fire. He was working on… I don’t know what, but… The Tribunal got involved, and there was a fire, OK? He died. I saw his body.”
“The Tribunal?” said Artur. “What was he up to for them to be taking an interest?”
Solina wrung her hands and shuffled from foot to foot as she decided how much to share. “He was a bio-engineer. Working on… I don’t know what. Some sort of cure for something, that’s what they told me, afterwards.”
“A cure?” said Artur. “For what?”
“Everything, he said. I mean, I don’t know,” said Solina. “Something to do with biology… something. I don’t know. He never really spoke about it. He told me it was a government thing, but he lied. He wasn’t licensed. The Tribunal found out, and they came after him.”
“And what about the cure?” asked Dan. “What about the thing he was working on?”
“Lost in the fire,” Solina said.
“Or hidden, maybe,” Dan mumbled.
Artur’s eyes widened. “What? No. Surely not? Ye’d have to be a special kind of bastard to do something like that, wouldn’t ye?”
“Something like what?” asked Solina, her voice growing louder and more anxious. “In fact, no! It doesn’t matter. He’s long dead, and someone has my daughter! You were supposed to get her back. You told me you would get her back!”
“Yeah, well…” Dan began. He glanced at his feet and squeezed the bridge of his nose. It had been a long night, but no need to take it out on this woman. “If he was alive. Let’s just say. Any idea where he’d be?”
“What? But, no, he…” She shut her eyes, composing herself. “No. I don’t know. His lab was destroyed in the fire. They knocked it down. I think there are houses there now.”
“Right,” said Dan. Another dead end.
“But he isn’t alive. He can’t be. I saw him. What was left of him. There’s no coming back from that.”
“Yeah, well, you’d be surprised,” said Dan. “Do you have any pictures?”
Solina’s brown crinkled. “Pictures?”
“Of him. Of Nona’s father.”
A flash of something like anger flew across Solina’s face, but then she relented. “Somewhere. Yes.”
“Could you find them?” Dan asked. He pointed to a door le
ading off from the room. A smiley face had been drawn on one of the gloss-painted panels. “Nona’s bedroom? Would you mind?”
“Please,” said Solina. “Please, anything. If it’ll help.”
Nona’s bedroom was small, and managed to look tidy, despite half the floor space being taken up by toys of various shapes and sizes. Dan stood just inside the doorway, eyes searching for something his brain hadn’t decided on yet. He felt a strange pang of guilt, like he shouldn’t be there, but fought the urge to turn away.
Artur, meanwhile, made a bee-line for the toys. One in particular.
“Psst, Deadman. Check me out,” he said.
Dan looked down to find Artur leaning against the door frame of a doll house. “What do ye think of me new pad, huh? Pretty grand, don’t ye think?”
“Get away from there,” Dan told him.
“Not on yer life,” said Artur, grinning. He pushed open the perfectly-sized door and disappeared inside. “Holy father, this place is amazing! Sure, it’s even got a big TV. Does it work, I wonder?”
A few moments passed, before his voice came again. “No, it doesn’t. Still nice pad, though.”
Shaking his head, Dan went back to examining the room. Or as close as he could get to examining it without moving.
It felt so pure, so whimsically innocent, with Nona’s own pictures covering the colorful walls, and a regiment of soft toys all standing guard around the bed. Dan, with his blood-stained shirt and coat, and scarred, decaying skin, had rarely felt so out of place. So unwelcome.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” he muttered.
What had he been expecting to find? A note from the kidnapper with instructions on how to get her back? A hand-drawn map with ‘I am here’ scribbled on it in Nona’s handwriting? Those would have been nice. Unlikely, but nice.
Instead, he found nothing. Nothing that wasn’t just usual kids’ room stuff, at least. He traced his fingers across a small, clumsily-painted dressing table. Another smiley face had been drawn onto the top. This one was winking, and Dan couldn’t shake the feeling it was taunting him, somehow.
“Artur, come on. Let’s go,” he said, turning away.
“Give us a minute there, Deadman. I may have found something.”
“Oh?” said Dan. “What?”
“Just hold yer horses while I check it out,” Artur replied, but Dan was in no mood to wait.
Squatting beside the doll’s house, Dan found the latch that held the front wall in place, and unclipped it with the two working fingers of his woman’s hand. The wall opened like a door, and Dan was confronted by a close-up view of a bent-double Artur’s bare buttocks.
“What the fonk are you doing?” Dan whispered.
Artur straightened with a yelp. “Ah! Bloody Hell, Deadman! Don’t sneak up on me like that, ye near gave me a feckin’ heart attack, ye big eejit!”
“What are you doing?” Dan hissed. He glanced back at the bedroom door. “Why are you naked?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have been naked if you’d given me a minute like I asked ye to,” Artur told him.
“Why are you naked at all?”
Artur, who was making no attempt whatsoever to cover said nakedness, gestured to a tiny wardrobe standing against the back wall of the doll house. “Observe, Deadman,” he said, then he danced towards it, sideways, in a way deliberately designed to make his penis twirl like a baton. Dan looked back to the bedroom door again.
“If she comes in and sees this…”
“Check it out!” said Artur, reaching into the wardrobe and pulling out a long summer dress. “Clothes. My size clothes. Not ones made by sticking some holes in a paper rectangle.”
He took out another outfit. It was white and blue, and resembled the uniform of the Girls’ Brigade, or the Young Ladies’ Platoon, or whatever it was calling itself these days.
“She’s got the whole shebang. Hats and shoes. Sure, there’s even some little scarves. For when it gets cold, like.”
“They’re all women’s clothes,” said Dan. “I mean, female doll clothes.”
“That’s a bit rich, ye big woman-handed bastard,” Artur replied. “And I remind you again, Deadman, that until thirty second ago, I was wearing a feckin’ envelope with a hole cut in it for me head to go through. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Wait, what?” Dan said, his voice dropping even further into a whisper. “You can’t take them.”
“I can, and I am,” Artur corrected. He slid the dress over his head and gave a twirl. “Fits like a glove. Here, quick, put the rest in yer pocket.”
“No! You can’t just take her stuff!”
“Come on, she’s bound to be dead now, anyhow,” said Artur, admiring himself in a mini mirror. “And if she’s not, I’d be surprised if her dolly’s clothes are going to be the main focus of her concerns.”
Dan ground his teeth together. “Pick three,” he said.
“Three? How am I meant to do that?”
“What are you doing?” asked Solina, appearing in the doorway behind them.
Dan resisted the urge to jump up, knowing it would leave Artur exposed, so he remained in his squatting position, but twisted around to face the door.
“Hmm? Oh, just looking for clues.”
Solina’s eyes flicked past him. “In the dolls’ house?”
“You’d be surprised,” said Dan, although he didn’t go so far as to explaining why she’d be surprised, or what by.
He felt a weight drop into the coat pocket closest to the doll house. “Well, nothing to report in there,” Artur announced from inside the pocket. “No, you know, clues or what have ye.”
Dan closed over the front of the toy house, then straightened up. Solina extended a photograph out to him. “This is the only one I could find,” she said. “Janto hated getting his picture taken.”
The image was taken in some sort of science lab. It was a full length shot of a middle-aged humanoid male struggling to hold a furry creature Dan thought was a bompit. The cuddly critters were popular as both family pets and scientific test subjects. This floppy-eared specimen was several times as big as it should have been, though, and the man was craning his neck to see above a row of spiked ridges that ran the length of the animal’s back. Dan had never seen those on a bompit before.
Nona’s father was smiling, and looked friendly enough. Dan couldn’t see much of him behind the bompit, but he seemed to be wearing a lab coat and some sort of apron. His pants were brown and slightly flared at the bottom, and the only even vaguely noteworthy thing about him was that he was only wearing socks, not shoes, on his feet.
“No shoes,” he remarked.
Solina shrugged. “He always did that.”
“Right,” said Dan.
And that was it. There was literally nothing else he could figure out from the photo. Once again, he wished he were a real detective. They’d know the questions to ask, the telltale quirks to look for that would lead them to the big break they needed to solve the case.
All Dan saw was a man with an oversized bompit and no shoes on, and he didn’t think either of those things were likely to tell him anything useful.
“Thanks,” he said, passing the photo back.
Solina took it and managed a hopeful smile. “Did it help?”
“Yeah, it, uh…” Dan began, but there was nowhere to go from there but into bare-faced lying, and the woman deserved better than that. “No,” he said. “No. Didn’t help.”
Solina sagged down and sat on her daughter’s bed. Her hand glided across the smooth linen, her tears coming again. “Where is she? What’s happening to her?”
“I wish I knew,” Dan told her. “I’m sorry.”
Something about this voice made the woman look up. “You’re not… You can’t give up. You said you’d find her.”
“I said I’d try. And I have,” said Dan. “I’ve tried, but I don’t know what else to do. This isn’t the sort of thing I usually… I shouldn’t have taken your
case. I’m sorry.”
“No! You can’t quit. I won’t let you!” cried Solina, jumping up and shaking him by the shoulders. “You said you’d find her. You took my money. That’s a contract! We made a contract!”
“I’ll repay the money,” Dan said. “Trust me, it’s in your daughter’s best interests if we let the Tribunal handle this.”
“The Tribunal?” Solina spat the words out. She punched Dan in the chest. It was limp, and there was no force behind it, but it hurt worse than anything else he’d been hit with that night. “You think they’ll help her? You think they’ll do anything? They don’t care!”
“And what makes you think I do?” Dan retorted, catching her fist before she could hit him again. “You paid me to do a job, I can’t do that job, so I’ll give you a refund. This was a business transaction. Nothing more.”
He felt himself wince at his own words, but turned away to disguise it. “I’m sorry. I hope you find her, I really do.”
As Dan made for the door, Artur’s head popped up out of his pocket. “He doesn’t mean that. About not caring, I mean. Trust me, he’ll be feeling guilty about it for days. Seriously, I won’t hear the end of it, he’ll be all—”
Dan shoved his hand in his pocket, forcing Artur down. He hesitated at the broken door, but only for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And with that, he was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Two more over here, barkeep,” called Artur, clicking his fingers. He had stashed the entire contents of the doll house wardrobe – and the wardrobe itself – in Dan’s pocket, and was now wearing a cheeky off the shoulder cocktail dress, which he’d paired with some plastic yellow clogs. “And make them doubles.”
Dan nursed his glass between the finger and thumb of the more masculine of his arms. The liquid inside swirled around as he turned the tumbler, coating the sides in an amber sheen. Artur’s glass, meanwhile, was empty. He held his paper straw like a wizard’s staff, tapping the bottom of it impatiently on the sticky bar top.
“What do ye think?” Artur asked.
Dan tore his eyes from the glass. “About what?”
Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1) Page 17
