Titanshade

by Dan Stout

  “It’s almost morning,” he said. “Let’s go in to see Bryyh together.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He pointed back down the hall. “Don’t you abandon that girl now, Carter.”

  I took a step toward him.

  “Watch what you’re saying.” I didn’t have to fake the ice in my tone.

  “She needs you right now. We need you to help bring in whoever did this to her. And we need to get a protective detail on her room.”

  I reeled a bit at that idea of protection. “They were trying to kill me, not her.”

  He snorted. “I don’t care what their plan was, she’s the person who got hit. Now she’s a loose end.”

  I thought about it. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call it in.”

  “And you’re going to talk to Bryyh.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything. How you know Talena. How she was poisoned. Everything you told me about Gellica and Harlan.”

  I wavered. “I got no proof, though, Jax. I got nothing but my word, and a day ago my word got dragged through the mud. Probably will again once today’s papers hit the streets, unless some other scandal has come along in the meantime.”

  “Well, then talking to Bryyh’s not going to make anything worse, now is it?”

  He winced and shifted his shirt to relieve pressure on his injured arm.

  “You can do this alone,” he said. “Or you can do it with the full backing and support of the entire Bunker. Which would you rather have?”

  “They’re not going to listen to me at the Bunker.”

  “Maybe not all of them. But someone will. Bryyh’s on duty in a couple hours. Let’s lay it all out and see what happens.”

  I rolled my head, felt the crackle and pop of the movement.

  “I’ll be at the Bunker in two hours,” I said, then walked away.

  I walked aimlessly, following the maze of hospital corridors, with their vinyl floor tiles and sheets of vinyl wall coverings. One foot after the other, I kept walking, eventually passing through the emergency room entry doors, placing my hand in the air stream of the large entry vent and praying as I went. “For your suffering, which brings us warmth and safety, we thank you.”

  My car was still sitting in the emergency zone, where I’d left it when I carried Talena into the emergency room. All around me was the calm of the ER entryway. There was no activity at all, which is how it would stay until a paramedic team burst in with a dead or dying person on a gurney. It wasn’t that different from being a cop. Boredom punctuated by terror and remorse.

  I turned and faced the city. The calendar had flipped to a new day since I’d brought Talena into the emergency room, but in Titanshade the sunrise was still a long way off.

  At the moment, that suited my mood just fine.

  25

  THINGS DIDN’T BRIGHTEN UP FOR me at the Bunker.

  “Are you saying that I poisoned her?” I couldn’t keep the anger from seeping into my voice.

  Bryyh pinched her fingers as if snapping that line of thought shut. “Of course not. But I can’t get warrants issued for people like Harlan and Gellica just on your word.”

  Ajax and I had briefed her on the developments, and the three of us sat in her office, surrounded by her diplomas and pictures of her kids as the level of tension increased to its normal fever pitch.

  “Why not?” I demanded, already knowing the answer.

  “Because right now your word isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.”

  I sucked air through my teeth and managed to keep my mouth shut. Bryyh kept going.

  “You think judges don’t watch the news? Judge Fox is getting roasted right along with you for signing off on the raid on Flanagan’s ranch. Not a single other judge will put a signature on something with your name on it unless it’s verified five ways to Friday. And they sure as shortcuts aren’t going to okay a fishing expedition on one of the city’s preeminent citizens.”

  “Harlan Cedrow is willing to kill anyone who gets in the way of—” I waved my hand in the air.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Of what?”

  “Of some plot that’s so bizarre that I’m not even sure he knows what it is.”

  Bryyh sighed. “That nutjob happens to be the descendant of a founding family, and closely tied to the Therreau community. And,” she said, “he’s the biggest beneficiary of the wind farm deal going through. But that’s okay”—she leaned in—“because you assure me that he’s sabotaging his own deal by killing a foreign diplomat, then working to free the man who he set up to take the fall, and then trying to kill you for not being able to figure it out fast enough? That’s the case you want to take to the City Attorney?”

  “He tried to kill me because I told him we had Jermaine.”

  “If he really believed that, wouldn’t he have tried to kill the Jermaine kid? What would killing you solve?”

  She raised a good point. It was like there were two separate cover-ups of the same crime. I sat back in the office chair and tried to reconnect the dots.

  “Are you telling me to let it drop?” I asked.

  “No.” She exhaled, and her hands shook. She was fighting to control her temper. Normally I would give a damn. Right then I was glad to see her suffer. “Carter . . . no. We are not letting anyone walk from this shit-storm. But we also aren’t going to be able to bring in someone like Harlan by storming into his office and accusing him with no proof. You know that, and I think you’re being obstinate just as an excuse to be an ass.”

  That stung close to home.

  “I know he did it,” I said.

  “Oh, for—” She threw her hands up. “Listen to yourself! I don’t care what you know. A jury doesn’t care what you know. And the CA damn sure doesn’t care what you know. The only thing that matters is what you can prove.” She stressed “prove” like she was giving a speech to a halfwit rookie who cared more about TV-style justice than learning how to work the system. “And you already admitted that Harlan wasn’t the last person in possession of the flask before you.”

  “So what do we do now?” I said.

  “We continue the investigation. You take a day and collect yourself.”

  “You gotta be out of—”

  “Carter! You are way too emotionally hot right now to think with anything approaching a rational mind. Why is that?”

  “It’s probably because one rich asshole or another just tried to kill me.”

  “And failed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But someone else is in the hospital.”

  I swallowed. “Yeah,” I said, quieter this time. “Talena Michaels.”

  “Who is this girl? Who is she to you?”

  “I knew her mother.”

  Bryyh let out a now-we’re-getting-somewhere kind of sigh. She leaned against her desk. “How long have you known her?”

  “Since she was six.”

  Bryyh frowned, but somehow she made it the most sympathetic scowl I’d ever seen. I’d been about that age when Bryyh met me, after my mom was killed. She was there at the funeral, part of the honor guard for a cop killed in the line of duty.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t think of a single reason why seeing her poisoned would make you emotionally skewed.”

  “Motivated,” I said. “It makes me motivated.”

  “It should make you off the case.” Bryyh glared at me.

  I leaned forward and opened my mouth, but Ajax got there first. “Captain,” he said. “We need Carter in order to—”

  “Oh, shut it.” She didn’t even bother to look at him. “Save your solidarity speech. I said ‘should’ take you off the case. If I wanted to do everything by the book I’d have moved to some rich city by the Inland Ocean where they don’t have more murderers than churchgoers. You”—she pointed at me—“
will stay on the Squib case in an advisory role only. And you”—she redirected her finger to Ajax—“you’ll be responsible for making sure that role stays advisory.”

  I raised a hand. “Can you define ‘advisory’?”

  “It’s a word that means ‘don’t be a pain in my ass,’” she said. “Because if you do, you’ll be scraping street pancakes until you retire.” She looked at each of us. “That means nothing that gets your face in the paper, nothing that gets me phone calls from the mayor’s office, and nothing that involves harassing city fathers without due process—specifically Harlan, or anyone else who has Rediron Drilling on their resume. Other than that, I don’t really give a damn how you do it, but you will be helping this case come to a rapid close. Are we perfectly clear about this?”

  * * *

  Bryyh asked Ajax to stay in her office after I left, probably to give him instructions on keeping me in line and out of the limelight. I headed toward the exit. After all, I had a day on my own. To “collect” myself.

  I turned a corner and almost ran into Angus. He was walking with a cadre of admirers, all of them hanging on every word as he told some witty anecdote. Angus wore a crisply pressed suit and carried a fleece overcoat draped over one arm. He must have recently come from somewhere leeward. When we all came to a stop he’d managed to stand in the single beam of sunlight that broke through the fog that day.

  What a dick.

  “Carter,” he said, his mandibles spread in what I knew was a gesture of welcome. It always made me feel like I was about to be eaten.

  He shifted his coat to the other arm, draping it over the briefcase and freeing up a hand to clasp me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re going through this thing with the media.”

  I grunted and dropped my eyes. Angus’s nicely shined shoes had an irregular line of dirt along the toes. Even the immaculate Angus couldn’t keep clean in Titanshade.

  “It’ll pass,” I said. “I just hope something happens to distract those jackals quick.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be old news before long.”

  Classic Angus. He genuinely didn’t care about me or my well-being. But he said all the right things, so he was accepted by everyone else. I never understood the line between his type of emotional dishonesty and a sociopath who fakes a conscience in order to function in society. I wonder how many of us fell farther down on the dark end of the spectrum than we’d care to admit?

  I cut the empty chitchat short with a shrug and head scratch that said well, I gotta go, Angus ol’ buddy, and continued on my way. His coterie laughed, and I wondered how long before Myris and Hemingway would be moved to his team, or if I’d be working under him next. But I stopped walking when I heard him call out.

  “I think there’s a nice scandal brewing that’ll distract from your sufferings.”

  I turned and looked back. The beam of sunlight that he’d been standing in now washed over me. I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. The brightness hurt my eyes, made me squint. I held up a hand to hide in its shade. I was more comfortable in the darkness.

  “I’ve got an angle on one of your little envoys from the AFS. Lowell, the beefy one.” He held up his thumb and index finger. “I’m this close,” he said, “from hanging that candy murder on him. And if that breaks, who knows how long it’ll be before I close up the Haberdine case.”

  “You still holding on to that pipe dream?” I asked.

  Angus kept walking toward me as he talked, leaving his fan club behind. Soon he was close enough that only I could hear his words.

  “You don’t want any more headaches.” His tusks were spotless and his head plates shone with fresh polish, but his breath had the bitter reek of stale coffee. “Stay out of my way or you’ll get chewed up in the machine.”

  He turned on the slick sole of his dress shoe and walked away. I was frozen for a moment, then dropped my hand. The sunlight burned my eyes, but I just took it. Penance for spending too many years in the dark.

  * * *

  When I hit the streets outside the Bunker the protest had grown, both in size and intensity. Chanting crowds blocked the steady flow of pedestrians, choking and constraining traffic. And just like an obstructed internal combustion engine, the system was starting to backfire.

  Someone pushed someone else, a push became a punch, and overreactions rippled through the mass of bodies, multiplying as they went. The crowd seethed, twisting and turning in on itself. The chants changed, lost their rhythm, became screams. Fists that had been pumped into the air to show unity now swung out in anger.

  A heavy clumping noise rose above the sounds of the chaos, and the patrol force that ringed the crowd faded back to allow colleagues in riot gear to step to the fore. The thick clumping was the sound of batons beating on riot shields.

  I retreated. There was nothing I could do in plainclothes that wouldn’t get me killed, or at least clubbed into submission. I looked for the easiest escape route when there was a sudden tug on my coattails, and a high-pitched, crackling voice yelled behind me.

  “Carter!”

  I spun and saw a Therreau youth running down the street, glancing over his shoulder at me. Daring me to give chase. I’m too old to run on demand and I would have chalked it up to a kid getting caught in the wild abandonment of the crowd, but he’d called my name. So I started in pursuit, ignoring the voice in my head advising caution every bit as much as I ignored the pain in my legs.

  We crossed Deland Avenue, gliding between cars and leaving a chorus of blaring horns and raised middle fingers in our wake. The youth didn’t speed up. He wanted me to follow.

  He also didn’t turn his head, so I wasn’t sure who it was. But I had a guess.

  At last he ducked down an alley. When I came around the corner, he’d disappeared. But there, tall and stock-still, dressed in blue and white, with a wide-brimmed hat was the one person who had absolutely no business standing around outside the Bunker.

  My throat tightened up and my jaw started to shake. The son of a bitch raised a hand to his shaved scalp in lazy salute.

  “You got a minute?” asked Flanagan.

  26

  FLANAGAN’S SMUG SMILE WASN’T ANY more likable than the last time I’d seen him. I walked farther into the alley, the noise and bustle of the city fading as I focused on the disgraced cop before me.

  He was dressed in the Therreau fashion, black vest over white button-down shirt paired with canvas pants and a wide-brimmed, dark hat. But the air of an honest farmer was shattered by the way he leaned on the hood of a late-model coupe. He held the kind of relaxed posture that indicated that he owned the vehicle, everything in it, even the pavement it sat on. None of that was true—I could see a tibron beetle and wagon farther down the alley—but he oozed possession and entitlement. Flanagan stretched his long arms and rolled his neck as I approached, like he was limbering up for a fight. I fought the urge to swing at him first.

  “Been looking for you, Carter.”

  That I believed. He wasn’t the type to hang around the Bunker sampling the food trucks.

  “You found me,” I said. “What do you want?”

  He chewed on air, as if he were having trouble getting the words out.

  “I want to help.”

  “So make a donation to the patrol fundraiser,” I said. “I can’t talk to you without your lawyer present.” But I didn’t turn away.

  Flanagan pushed off from the car. “I heard you put a girl in the hospital last night.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. I stepped toward him, hands curling into fists. Four inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me, Flanagan didn’t flinch.

  “You want to assault the guy you unjustly imprisoned? Right in front of the Bunker? Shortcuts.” He sneered. “Even you’re not that stupid. And not so charmed that you’d get away with it.”

  “Charmed?” I sai
d. Far as I could see, my career had mostly been cursed.

  Flanagan eyed the alleyway opening. He had the look of a man who didn’t want to be seen talking to me.

  “This girl,” he said.

  “Talena.”

  “Whatever. She helped a kid I knew.”

  “She helps lots of kids,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I only care about one of them.” A pause while he shot a look over his shoulder, deeper down the alley where the cart’s driver and the boy who’d drawn me there had the tibron beetle turning tight circles. Always moving, going nowhere.

  Flanagan adjusted his hat. “Maybe you noticed I got out of jail pretty damn fast,” he said. “Not this last charge. Before that.”

  He meant the stint he’d done for murder, extortion. His reign of terror.

  “I heard you named names,” I said.

  He cocked a nonexistent eyebrow. “You think I’d snitch?”

  “Yes.”

  He slid a thumbnail between two teeth, fishing out an invisible seed.

  “Maybe.” He popped his lips. “But I didn’t have to. Someone did me a solid. Evidence came under question, witnesses recanted. I walked. Takes money and favors to make that happen. A lot of favors. A lot of money. And a special kind of person.”

  The kind of person who’d send in a high-priced attorney to pull him out of jail.

  I grimaced. “Harlan Cedrow.”

  He didn’t say a word, and that told me everything.

  “So now he owns you.” I got a spike of pleasure watching Flanagan’s face cloud over. “Guess you ended up someone’s lapdog after all.”

  “Think what you want,” he said. “There’s more than one person pulling strings. This whole town’s crooked, and no one’s capable of keeping their fingers out of the pie.”

  I didn’t disagree.

  “And you?” I asked. “What did these mysterious people want with you?”

  Plucked brows pulled together, creating a crease smoother than a baby’s rear end.

  “To have me in their toolbox.” His eyes flashed with anger, but it wasn’t directed at me. “These rich sons of bitches sit in their Mount-side mansions and collect people. I got placed with the Therreau and told to blend in. Then I did jobs, small things.”