Bone Wires

by Michael Shean

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Gray took his glass in hand and jingled the whiskey stones to get the waitress’s attention.

  She came by on cue. Gray asked for another Balvenie. “I’ll have what he’s having,” Moody said with a rogue’s wink cast her way; she flushed and floated off again in a hurry.

  “I love good service,” Moody said with a chuckle. “So that was an interesting speech you gave today, Dan. Congratulations are in order.”

  “I guess that goes for both of us,” said Gray. “I didn’t know you’d gotten promoted. Last time I checked, you were still a Tier Five.”

  Moody bobbed his head a bit. “That last one was kept pretty quiet, yeah. Well, I’ve done enough for the company that I don’t have to advertise, but you! Well, my friend, you certainly outdid yourself. Found yourself a career butcher and everything. I hear Administration’s looking at Homicide Solutions in a new light.”

  Gray downed the rest of his remaining Balvenie and shook his head. “Donner – or Muller, I guess – is still out there. I didn’t catch him.”

  “True,” Moody said with a nod, “But that doesn’t mean you did a bad job, either. You had good instincts going after him. I read your case report; anyone else I know would’ve homed in on the Duwamish.”

  “I don’t know why you’d say that.” Gray shrugged. “I mean it was pretty clear, once Evidence found the DermaKnit inside the ventilation shaft. I didn’t go to the gallery expecting to find…” In his mind he saw Bradstreet going down, his guts spilling out between his fingers, the horrible death-goddess mask of Lin’s face. “Well, you know.”

  Moody waved an impatient hand and shook his head. “No, you’re missing it,” he said. “The point is –“ He paused as the waitress arrived and delivered their drinks; she gave Moody a wink back, which sparked a hint of jealousy inside of Gray. Oh good, yet another guy who gets more notice than I do. When she left, Moody continued. “The point is that you could’ve just sent a van down and had the whole group picked up, let the prosecutor put together some bullshit circumstantial case and been done with it. Instead, you saw it through.”

  Gray frowned very faintly and took a fairly stiff swallow from his glass. “What’re you getting at, Detective?”

  “What I’m getting at, Dan, is that I think I like you.”

  That got him quiet. Gray looked at Moody for a moment, then coughed. “Uh, don’t let this fool you,” he said, fingering the cap on his lapel. “I just wear them for fashion’s sake.”

  For a moment, Moody looked at him blankly – and then launched into a loud bark of a laugh. “Oh! Shit, man, no,” he said, shaking his head and reaching for his glass. “No. I mean, I like how you work. You took a risk on that Muller thing; if there hadn’t been anything there, I mean, you could’ve gotten seriously reprimanded for wasting company time.” Moody took a draw off his scotch, swallowed, and smacked his lips faintly. “Shame about those Pacifiers, though.”

  Gray felt a sting of guilt as he thought about Murdock sitting on her sister’s sofa, pregnant and alone. “Yeah,” he said, staring into his glass. “I’m gonna try and do something about that, if I can.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “Not while she’s getting fried by the press, anyway. I might be able to help her out, though.”

  “Yeah?” Gray looked up at Moody, whose wide smile had returned. “What can you do?”

  Moody shrugged. “Vice is the most directly powerful subsidiary of the company,” he said. “I mean Pacification does the larger share of the work, sure, but we’re the one who’s good for PR. And we learn things, you know that. Like how I know you’re seeing that sweet little caramel girl from over at the Hilton.”

  There was something in Moody’s smile that now put Gray on the defensive. The shark’s teeth were pointed at him. “She’s been cleared,” he said. “Besides, we’re just friends.”

  “Friends who stay over at each other’s places?” Moody chuckled. “Come on, Dan, you don’t have to give me that. Look, as long as you weren’t chasing her during your investigation, you’re fine, right?” His blue eyes glittered, and Gray suddenly wanted very much to be somewhere else. “Anyway, so as I was saying. You like to take risks. How would you like to do a little work for me while you’re playing hero in the Corpse Brigade?”

  The thought of working with Vice sent conflicting signals through Gray’s brain, stimulating his centers of avarice and caution at once. “What did you have in mind?” he asked, watching Moody with suspicion over the rim of his glass.

  “Well…” He stretched the syllables out. “It’s about that girl you’re not dating. You know, the stripper.”

  “Angie Velasquez.”

  “Right, right.” Moody nodded. “You know that club she’s working out of? The Autumn Heights?”

  Gray’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Yeah?”

  Moody shrugged. “Well, since you brought me up to the bartender over there,” he said, “I figured that I’d go and see what the fuss was over there. Turns out they’re running a fair amount of Shard over there – guests, staff, everyone’s got access. I don’t like that, you know?”

  “Angie’s not mixed up in that.” It came out faster than Gray had even thought it, all in a sharp-edged rush. “I mean she doesn’t show any symptoms of Shard use.” Shard was a potent synthetic opioid made overseas; it wasn’t physically addictive, per se, but using it realigned your biochemistry so that you needed it – or one of a host of other chemically similar opioids, most of which were – to continue functioning. Using it even once marked the injection site with black webs as the local capillaries filled with it, almost like cracks in glass. Hence the name, of course.

  “Oh yeah?” Moody’s smile was wide and sharkish now, and Gray realized he’d gotten caught in something. “Now you tell me, Dan. How would you know that if you hadn’t seen her with her clothes off?”

  Damn. “She’s a stripper,” Gray said evenly. “Night I first met her, she was riding the pole.”

  “Yeah, but you need to be up close to see the marks,” said Moody.

  Gray felt hand tighten around his glass, but he held his ground. “Not that close.”

  Moody saw the look on his face and snorted. “Yeah, well,” he said, “Maybe not. Point is that I want to get that shit broken up, and your girl’s the key to it.”

  “Is she?” Gray stiffened a bit in his seat.

  “Absolutely!” Moody was in his element now, lounging in his seat, one arm draped across the back of the booth. “I mean, you say she’s not into Shard, which of course I believe, and that means she’s probably the only one there who isn’t. Maybe she can, you know, throw a little info our way. I mean obviously if she was shooting it things would go more smoothly, but you can’t have everything you want.”

  “I don’t know that I like the idea of dragging her into this, Bud.” And it was true – he’d just started things with her. They hadn’t even slept together, at least not in the sexual sense. So why would he be offering her up to the Vice machine? Why would he ever want to offer her up to the Vice machine? “Besides, she’s trying to get out of that place.”

  Moody was quiet for a moment. He looked at Gray as if he had seen him for the first time. “I see,” he said, and his voice had gotten a bit softer now. “Tell me something, Dan. You got anything you don’t want me to know about?”

  Here it comes, Gray thought. The thing for which that fucker is so famous. “I’d say no,” he replied, “But you and I know that it doesn’t mean anything. You find what you want to find.”

  “Or make it happen on my own,” Moody replied with a nod. “So are you going to help me out?”

  Gray weighed his options. He could shoot him in the face, maybe. Or barring that, he could report him – but neither was going to get him removed. Not really. He might die, or he might get fired, but…he would always be there. Sitting there, Gray understood something important. The body of the man there was irrelevant. Someone would always be there to fill out the suit.
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  “All right,” Gray said, “I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  “Perfect.”

  “One question, though.”

  Moody’s brows steepled. “Yeah?”

  “How did you know I threatened the bartender with your name that night?”

  “Because he works for me,” Moody said with a wink. “Only he’s too valuable to waste on a sting operation.”

  Gray could almost feel the Hornisse vibrate in its holster, begging to be drawn. Getting up from the table and leaving Moody behind without indulging it was the hardest thing that he had done all day.

  Gray left the bar and crossed the street to the parking building where his car had been racked, fighting the urge to go back in there and shoot Moody in the face. Moody wasn’t the sort who just swooped in out of nowhere – if he’d heard about Gray using his name, he must have been watching him for some time. That would be about right, to wait for him to get something shiny and new to lose and hold it over his head. This was the kind of pattern he’d heard of before, too – but he didn’t think it would happen just because he said the man’s name. Something was off, he could feel it in his bones. This had nothing to do with any Shard ring – the question was to try and figure out what, and how he could discover it without giving Angie up on the altar.

  He entered the parking building and stood in the delivery bay, which was a plain vault of concrete with a kiosk set in the wall. He fed his claim slip into the kiosk and watched as a great hatch in the ceiling slid open and the Vectra was delivered by a great metal arm with a pair of powered jaws. It was a bit like watching Godzilla regurgitate some long-eaten Japanese taxi. The arm stretched down and deposited the car on the floor of the vault before retracting away behind the closing hatch. And the hand of God will reach down to crush you, he thought, and for a moment he confused God with Bud Moody. Then he got into the car.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gray set the car to take him home again. He leaned back in the driver’s seat and tuned the network to NewsNetNow, which was again extolling the virtues of the Muller case and his own person. He switched it to a retro music channel, and got the Telecom Junkies. The ‘30s were a good decade for hotbeat music, the electronic and ethnic beats weaving themselves together; the beat was entirely separate from the flow of the traffic and the winking of the holos and the neon rails. He closed his eyes and let it fill him, a rare indulgence indeed, but it worked for him now. He needed something new, something…novel. Might as well be good music, if old music.

  As he closed his eyes, he started to turn things over in his mind. Strangely enough, his brain did not go to the situation at hand but to the case that had just been declared closed. Again, too neat. Too simple. Maybe they had been connected just the way it had been shown; maybe they had all been in league with Muller in the first place. But what about their other crimes, their pasts? Whatever horrors Muller had been into, other than Lin there was no information as to how these people met. No records. Plenty of records of association after the fact, but how did they get together? There had to be some central agency, a service or a method if not a person; these people were too perfectly matched, too easily drawn into confederacy.

  Gray thought on that as the car moved, and the lights of the city branded luminous shadows on the backs of his eyelids. Well, that might be true, but the case was closed, the budget sealed. If he tried to re-open it without any kind of proof it would be a problem. The flashes of light from the city beyond seemed to reform into a shadow of the ticker that trailed on the monitor, spelling out the net worth of his life’s stock. Currently it was trading high, but the projections involved in his digging back into this thing were looking mighty poor. Gray sighed and opened his eyes as the Telecom Junkies faded away, and he sat up in his seat. Well, he was going to have to talk to her sooner or later, he thought, so he decided to get it over with.

  He told the car to dial Angie.

  She appeared in the console with a head of wet hair being ruffled in a towel; she didn’t bother wrapping herself up, smiling naked to the waist in the camera. “Hi, baby,” she said brightly, grinning at him. “Nice to hear from you already. Thought you’d be passed out in bed by now.”

  Gray stared at her image for a moment, then smiled. “Hey,” he said, “Nice to see you too. Wow, you look nice.”

  “Oh yeah?” She looked down at herself and smiled, turning her shoulders this way and that in a coy gesture. “Maybe I just wanted to give you a glimpse of things to come.”

  He couldn’t help it. Gray grinned at her, folding his arms over his chest and akin in the view. “Man, I can’t help it. I’d love to see that time and time again. Every morning.”

  “You sure?” Angie pulled the towel free and lifted her arms over her head, drawing her long black hair upward through her fingers in a sexy pose. “What’s my best feature, do you think?”

  “Your eyes,” Gray said without a thought. “No contest.”

  She let her hair drop and smiled. “You’re a sweetheart. So what’s up? Did you just miss me?”

  Inside his head, Gray’s thoughts went to war with one another. He could ask to see her, but that meant he’d have to talk to her. Or did he? Could he just let it drop for a few days, figure out what he wanted to do? Or would Moody be after him straight away for an answer? “I just missed you, yeah,” he said, giving her what he hoped was a convincing smile. “Is work okay? Do you need me to come down there or anything, give you a ride home?”

  Her eyes widened a little bit. “Hey, I couldn’t ask you to do that,” she said with a laugh. “Unless you’re close.”

  “Yeah,” he lied. “I’m close. When do you get off?”

  Angie’s face lit up a bit more – but then she gave him a look that was mockingly severe. “Hey, you’re not waiting for me in the parking lot, right? Because that would be creepy.”

  Gray laughed despite himself. “No, no,” he said. “C’mon, now. I’m a cop, not a stalker.”

  “Oh, one never knows,” she said with a smirk. “Sometimes that happens. Wouldn’t be the first boyfriend I had that got possessive, you know?”

  That wasn’t something he’d expected to hear. “Boyfriend,” he repeated, tasting the word on his tongue. “Is that what I am?”

  She looked at him as if he’d asked her what his name was. “Well, yeah,” she said, “I mean, I thought so. Is that not what’s going on?”

  Well, this was the moment, wasn’t it? He could be the big idiot and try and be noble, tell her that no, they weren’t dating or whatever – but that was bullshit, and he didn’t feel like playing the hero this time around. If Moody was going to make him fight, sure, fuck it. He’d fight. He didn’t just want to get PART of what he wanted, god damn it. “No,” he said, “That’s what’s going on. I guess…I just didn’t expect to hear the words coming out of your mouth.”

  “Honey,” she said, “You know I could’ve been the one on the end of that knife, right? It’s like I said. You get the boyfriend card if you want it.”

  “Yeah.” The words sounded nice in his ears, despite things – or maybe even more so because of them. “Yeah. But let’s talk soon, okay? Let me pick you up, I’ll take you to my place. Would that be okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She smiled at him again, showing dazzling white teeth, and propped her chin up on one hand; he remembered her smell, how it curled into his brain and took hold of him. Her skin glowed like warm caramel. He let out a deep sigh, and was hooked all over again. “I’ll see you soon, baby,” he told her. “When should I be by?”

  “It’s what, ten? Come by at eleven. I’m out by then.”

  Gray nodded. “All right. See you then.”

  Angie gave him one last teasing jiggle and a wink before killing the phone, leaving him halfway home. He took a deep breath and told the car to correct its course and turn toward Sea-Tac and the glittering hotel, where the damsel would be awaiting a rescue. He just hoped that the Devil wasn’t watching him, too. He’d ha
d enough of Him tonight.

  Gray’s watch read 10:47 when he parked the Vectra in the guest lot of the hotel. He wanted to go up, but he knew that if he did it was almost certain that he’d ruin Angie as a potential informant – he was a cop, and a very well-known cop right now. Maybe in a few weeks, when NewsNetNow had latched onto some other piece of murder or flash, but right now it’d be entirely wrong. For a moment he almost got out of the car and went anyway, but he knew how Moody would play it if he did. Defiance didn’t play well with Vice, and it definitely didn’t play well with Moody.

  So he waited, and while he did he watched the people going in and out of the doors of the hotel. It was a nice-looking building, like a vast ice palace shipped from what was left of the polar caps; he had an image of topless ice fairies flitting about serving the guests, and realized that whiskey and lack of sleep were completely fucking with him. Gray decided to stop thinking and wait until Angie was done. A little while later the car’s phone rang.

  “Answer,” he called out.

  “Uh, baby?” It was Angie. “I’m done. Where are you?”

  “Out in the parking lot,” he replied.

  “…You’re not going to meet me up here? Walk me down?” She sounded disappointed, but also somewhat hesitant.

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s not…you know, safe.”

  She was quiet a moment; he could watch her face through her phone camera as she struggled to parse that. “Safe for me, or safe for your career?”

  Gray shook his head. Christ, Moody, he thought to himself, I so owe you a bullet in the face. “It’s not like that,” he said, laying a hand over his brow. “Look…just come down and get in the car, please. I promise, I’m not trying to be a fucker. I got a definite reason here, yes, it’s work related, no, it’s not what you think. I swear.”

  Angie gave him a look that made her eyes tighten up into a cat’s, gleaming green and doubtful, but she nodded. “Fine,” she said. “But it better be a good one.”