Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  “Don’t you have any idea why he might have moved out?” I said, in between calls.

  “No,” she said. “And it’s none of your damn business, anyway.”

  I had always thought Irene and Rex had a perfect marriage. From my perspective, it had sure looked that way. But now a very different picture was taking shape. Missing money, missing kids, missing husband. I felt stupid, and angry, at the idea that I may have staked Lucy’s safety on a marital bond that turned out to be a lie. “If there was anything going on with you guys, you should have let me know.”

  “You’re my boss, not my fucking confessor,” Irene snarled.

  I had always seen Irene and Rex as a stable, high-functioning couple, unlike many in Shiftertown. They went to church. They cared deeply for their children. They did not spend their whole lives lurching from one personal crisis to another.

  But of course, the other thing about Irene and Rex was that they were reformed professional thieves. I had known that from the very beginning. I’d had a stake in believing that they really had put it all behind them … because if they could, maybe I could, too.

  My phone rang. I answered before I saw who it was.

  Jose-Maria d’Alencon.

  Oh, great.

  “Hey, Tiger. How was your trip?”

  I did not have the mental bandwidth for this. Phone on my lap, I overtook a truck, swerving hard against the AI’s resistance as it refused to let me veer into the oncoming lane. “Not bad. How’s it going, Bones?”

  “Good, good. Busy month at the precinct.”

  Rationality surfaced through the mental static of my fear for Lucy’s safety. We had got back so fast, d’Alencon may not yet have heard anything about our encounter with the Fleet in the Yesanyase Skont system. And maybe he never would. Best-case scenario, Captain Smith had obeyed MF’s admonition to keep his mouth shut. Even if he spilled the beans, the Fleet isn’t great about sharing information with planetary authorities. It might be OK.

  On the other hand, I had to tell d’Alencon about Burden’s scam, and my clash with Sophia, before he could find out about it from anyone else.

  “Listen, Bones, I’m kind of in the middle of something, but let’s meet up.”

  “Sounds good. When are you free?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly—”

  “We have an agreement, Tiger.” A hint of gravel in his voice.

  “I ain’t forgotten, but I’m on the road. I’ll get back with you later today.”

  My reckless driving got us home around 10:30 AM. Shiftertown enfolded us in its mangy, gaudy embrace. Tourists eddied up 90th St from the mighty money cataract of the Strip. A curbside barbecue truck marked the inland limit of the incursion. Beyond that, the street was quiet. A couple of local tigers lay up in the gravelnut trees. The kids next door were playing on the sidewalk. Just an ordinary weekday morning.

  Apart from the crime scene tape in front of our building, torn ends dangling from the railing of the front steps and the gravelnut tree.

  And the blackened, blistered porch, evidence of a conflagration that had engulfed the Seagraves’ balcony.

  I double-parked. Irene jumped out and dashed into her apartment, yelling for Rex and the kids.

  I could tell nobody was home. The whole place had the gloomy look of a condemned building.

  I unlocked the door of my apartment. It didn’t smell of burning in here. Instead there was a strong smell of paint. The fire had been confined to the porch.

  “Lucy,” I yelled hoarsely, knowing it was futile. I spun into the living-room. I’d left the room half-painted, but now the walls were done in a cheerful shade of yellow. My boots squeaked on a non-slip teal floor.

  “Hello?”

  Lunging down the hall, I caught Nanny B coming out of the kitchen. Her royal-blue antennas bobbled. She was even wearing her apron. It had paint stains on it. “Hello, Mike,” she quacked. “Welcome home.”

  The greeting struck me as a vicious twist of the knife. “What are you doing here? Where’s Lucy?”

  “She is at the range.”

  “The range? Alec Macaulay’s place? What’s she doing there?”

  “I do not have that information. Rex simply instructed me to tell you that they are at the range. He did not take me because, he stated, there are no outlets up there.”

  Relief flooded me. I turned on my heel, then turned back. “What happened on the front porch?” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the front door. “Looks like someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the house.”

  “No,” Nanny B said, “it was a homemade explosive device, consisting of a bottle filled with kerosene, and—”

  “Seriously?”

  “We immediately evacuated the children, using the emergency fire escape ladder which I urged Rex and Irene to buy. It is an essential home security item.” Nanny B vibrated smugly at her own foresightedness. “I called the fire department and the police. Unfortunately, by the time they arrived, the perpetrators of the attack had fled the scene.”

  That shook up my assumptions about why Rex had moved out. “It was the bears.”

  “That is what Rex thought.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “On September 6th.”

  Two days after Rex had pulled Lucy out of camp. “So Lucy was here at the time?” My blood ran cold at the thought.

  “At the time of the incident, Rex, Lucy, Mia, Kit, and myself were upstairs. Robbie Wolfe, Cosima Wolfe, and Marco Black were in this apartment. I am sorry to say they broke a window to escape. I will repair it if you authorize me to buy materials. I have finished painting the walls, as you see, but have been unable to initiate any further home improvement projects, as I do not have sufficient credit to buy materials.”

  “Sorry, Nanny,” I said. “I’m short of credit myself.” Robbie had cleaned me out. And yet he’d had the nerve to stay here, in my apartment, with his sister and his best bud, no less … until the bears tried to burn the house down.

  And Rex had taken my daughter out to the range.

  I hurried out to the street. “Irene! Irene!”

  She appeared on the balcony. “Everything’s wrecked up here. There’s soot all over everything. Water damage.” She held up a soot-smeared rag. “This is Kit’s blankie. Where are they?”

  “Out at the range,” I said. “Come on.”

  32

  I related what Nanny B had told me as I drove crosstown and turned onto Outback. The news restored Irene’s spirits. I drove at high speed through the Slumps, past the old helioba plantation, where an RV throng wallowed, reminding me of Timmy Akhatli. As we crossed Mill Creek, Irene glanced down at the stagnant brown water. “Wonder if they’ve found him yet?”

  “Nothing about it on the news,” I said, but I didn’t bother to take out my phone and dig. I was only interested in getting to Lucy.

  On the far side of the bridge, violently green undergrowth walled a narrow, twisting road. This was the way to Cascaville, the logging town on the far side of the hills, which also hosted Ponce de Leon’s largest Fleet base. I drove too fast, adrenaline pumping, around the blind curves. Ten klicks out of town, our phone service cut out, completing our transition from urban Mag-Ingat to an alien planet. The overhanging trees blocked out the sunlight. Tree slugs dropped onto the windshield, too heavy for the wipers to move. Irene had to lean out and pick them off.

  I almost missed the turnoff for the range. It had no signpost. You wouldn’t even notice it unless you knew it was there. An unpaved track wavered around forest giants, swung around hairpin bends, and dead-ended at a log laid on trestles. A sign hung from the log. Macaulay’s Live Fire Range. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

  I stopped the truck and rolled down my window. Heat flooded in, along with the distant pop-pop of rifle fire. Mosquitoes sang over stagnant puddles. I pushed my hair away from my sweaty forehead. Where had I gone wrong, that my daughter had ended up in a place like this?

  I blew the horn. Then we sat and waited u
ntil a lean, dark-skinned man, wearing a high-tech gun belt over camos, walked out of the trees. Alec Macaulay had nubbly close-cropped hair, a face that wasn’t built to smile, and a .45 in his holster.

  “Welcome back to civilization, Mike. Wasn’t expecting you for another few days.”

  “We made good speed on the return leg,” I said, shaking his hand.

  Alec was one of the most successful Shifter entrepreneurs on Ponce de Leon, although most folks had never heard of him. His business catered to the small but dedicated crowd of Shifter gun nuts. Some of them even lived out here in a kind of permanent training camp associated with the range. Alec was a fellow veteran of the 15th Recon—he’d done two tours on Tech Duinn, although we’d never crossed paths there—and a friend of Dolph’s. He was a man of integrity, and I knew he would not have offered Rex sanctuary if he thought he was mixed up with any shenanigans.

  “You’re looking for your kids,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Irene and I said.

  A couple more men materialized out of the brush and lifted the log barrier aside. We walked between trees furred with moss and vines, while Alec’s guys drove my truck away to some hidden parking area under the canopy. Mosquitoes sang over the puddles. The heat was intense, soupy. I felt witching-hour tiredness seeping in.

  The trail ended in a clearing in front of a timber house with a steeply pitched roof. Behind the house, shooters lay up in the outdoor firing lanes, banging away at targets that darted back and forth on robotic dollies in front of a red earth berm. The noise of gunfire echoed through the valley.

  “They’re over at the camp,” Alec said.

  “I know the way,” I said.

  “I’ll go with you.” As we tramped through the woods, getting eaten alive by the bugs, Alec pointed out sun-glint on a rifle barrel, almost concealed in the leaves. “I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t get there, either.”

  Wolf spoor pocked the mud. The gunfire from the range faded behind us. “You beefed up security recently?”

  “Ever since the Founding Day attack.” Alec and his people had helped us to foil Sophia’s plot. “That was a shock for a lot of people. It brought home how vulnerable Ponce de Leon is. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

  “Buy more ammo,” Irene said.

  “Great minds,” Alec said. Of course, that also increased his risk exposure, since the shooting range barely skirted PdL gun control laws. But that was his business. I slapped bugs off my arms and shaded my eyes as we emerged from the forest into the noonday sun.

  We stood at the foot of a low cliff webbed with ramps and walkways. Water poured over an unseen lip above, shooting out of the tropical tangle like a firehose, and plunged into a lower course hidden behind upside-down trees. In the lee of the cliff stood a wall-less building that Alec’s people called the chow hall, as if they were still in the army. It was half workshop and half living-room, with a solar roof supported by tree-trunk pillars, a firepit at one end, and counters and chopping blocks and workbenches at the other end. On San Damiano, it would be called a great hall, and it would have walls, since none of San D’s three livable continents is blessed with a tropical climate. All the same, this place reminded me more strongly of San Damiano than anywhere else I had been in the Cluster.

  Alec’s people lived in the caves in the cliff. We don’t do that at home, but then again, we aren’t paranoid gun nuts. Mostly.

  Pursued by insects, cocooned by the noise of the waterfall, we walked past the great hall to a stretch of cleared ground on the river-bank. Believe it or not, this sparkling cascade was Mill Creek, the same river that ran through the Slumps and Millhaven. Up here, it was a crystal-clear stream. Children swam in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. I looked for Lucy there, and missed seeing her at first in the knot of people on the shore, who stood ankle-deep around two men skinning a coypu.

  “Daddy!”

  Screaming, splashing out of the shallows, hair flying. Brown legs, bitty shorts. Her mother’s eyes, my smile.

  “Daddy!”

  She never held a grudge against me for my absences. Never welcomed me home with anything except joy. I didn’t deserve her. I caught her up, my back protesting, swung her around. “Came back early, sweetie.”

  Beside us, Irene hugged her own daughter. She and Mia looked more than ever like large and small versions of the same person, entwined.

  “Daddy, Daddy.” Lucy wrapped her legs around me, refusing to be put down. That instant confirmed my decision to sell the ship. I was through with leaving her behind. I kissed her hair—it smelled of woodsmoke—and peeled her off one limb at a time.

  “I didn’t know butchering coypus was on the summer camp curriculum,” I said. The beast we call a coypu, a PdL native animal, is the size of a cow, and looks like a capybara with the hide of an armadillo. They’re protected. This one hung by its feet from an A-frame, half-flayed, its blood swirling away into the water. Lucy giggled.

  “Isn’t it cool, Dad? We helped with the hunt.”

  “You’re going to eat that?” Irene said to Alec.

  “Ma’am,” Alec said, “there’s hardly anything a Shifter can’t eat, with enough soy sauce.”

  Irene smiled thinly. She was a city girl, and I got the impression that she couldn’t wait to gather up her family and get out of here. “Where’s my husband?”

  Alec pointed at the cave entrances. Irene strode that way, pulling Mia by the hand. I lingered with Lucy on the muddy beach. The sun was hot and the water looked cool. I had a strong urge to take off my shoes. “You were supposed to be at Lagos del Mar. What happened, sweetheart?”

  “Oh.” Lucy swiped her wild tangle of hair out of her face, suddenly serious. “It’s not safe there, is it, Dad?”

  “It apparently wasn’t safe at our house, either.”

  “That was super exciting! We had to climb out the window. But I’m talking about attacks from space. The Fleet can’t really protect us, when you think about it, can they?”

  She was right, of course. When you live at the bottom of a gravity well, there is little you can do to stop a determined attacker from dropping things on you. We’ve learned to live with that knowledge. But Lucy came to it with the open mind of childhood. She grasped how shockingly precarious our situation was.

  “If the Travellers strike Ponce de Leon, they would target Mag-Ingat,” she informed me. “The city would probably be completely destroyed. But up here, we’d be shielded by the hills.”

  I looked narrowly at Alec’s back, suspecting him of indoctrinating my daughter. “Nice bedtime stories they tell around here.”

  “Don’t get angry with Mr. Macaulay,” Lucy said.

  “I’m not. But who told you this stuff?”

  “Rex,” my innocent girl explained. “That’s why he took me away.”

  *

  I climbed the wooden ramp, built for four-legged folks, that led to the caves. Lucy and Mia leapt ahead of me, into a cave as wide as a train tunnel. It narrowed as it went back. After the sunlight, it seemed pitch black. Lucy’s hand and the rumble of Rex’s voice drew me further in.

  As my eyes adjusted, I made out futons and piles of furs on a raised platform covered with tatami matting that ran the length of the cave. On one of these futons lay Kit, asleep in the midday dusk. Irene lay beside him, one arm crooked protectively over his body. Rex, in lion form, bent his head over them. He turned his majestic visage to me.

  “Shoes,” he said, nodding to the tatami matting. “I’m always forgetting, but it’s the way they do things here.”

  I didn’t take off my shoes. I wasn’t planning to stay. “What did you do with my money?”

  *

  Rex followed me back outside, leaving Irene behind with Kit. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Lucy to stay behind, too. But she was already involved with this mess. Rex had involved her. She and Mia skirmished after us along the river, swishing swords made from string and sticks. Rex paced beside me, head low.


  “I fucked up, Mike. You ain’t gonna trust me anymore.”

  “You could be right about that.” The heat was getting to me. I sidestepped into the shade of the upside-down trees. Their above-ground root structures were twice the size of their tops. They didn’t offer much shade. “Then again, maybe it was my mistake trusting you in the first place.”

  We were out of earshot of the camp. Rex stopped walking. “They wanted half a million.”

  “Who did?”

  “I had no other way of getting it. I’m sorry.”

  “You took my money to pay … who?”

  But I already knew. I didn’t feel any surprise, just grim confirmation, when Rex muttered, “The bears.”

  “You miserable sack of fur,” I said. “You petty Shiftertown thief.”

  Rex cringed.

  I pulled off my t-shirt. “Why’d you take Lucy out of camp?” I already guessed this, too, but I wanted to hear it from him.

  “Failed,” he muttered.

  I unbuckled my belt, dropped my trousers and stepped out of them, taking off my socks and boots at the same time. The muddy ground felt just as good as I’d known it would on my bare feet. “I didn’t hear you.” In my peripheral vision, I saw Lucy and Mia standing frozen on the path.

  “Auto-payments failed.”

  “Because my bank account was hooked up to the corporate account. You cleaned that out, too.”

  “Camp called me up, asked for the money. I didn’t have it, so I had to take her away.”

  I kicked my undershorts away and dropped my hands towards the ground. They hit the mud as paws … not the paws of a wolf … but the paws of my new form, which no one had seen yet. Rex’s gaze travelled from the massive talons, up the muscular forelegs, to the terrifying head of a sabertooth tiger.

  I had always been interested in this animal, and the Hurtworlds run had given me the time I needed to learn and practise it. Extremely robust, the sabertooth tiger had disproportionately developed front legs and puny rear legs, compared to extant big cats. There was no consensus on how its coat may have been patterned, so I had gone for brown with a striking reddish tint. I may have made the fangs even scarier than they were in real life.