by K. W. Jeter
“Oh.” He shook his head, as though waking from deep sleep. “I’m sorry. I guess I have been a little . . . spaced.”
“What’s wrong?” Susan looked worried.
“It’s this business with Matthew.” George frowned. “I guess I—”
The doorbell cut through his words.
Emily jumped up. “I’ll get it.”
He straightened his spine, raising his head to look out the house’s front window. Beyond the neatly clipped lawn and the stubborn bird-of-paradise plants he and Susan had been trying to eradicate for the last year, a white delivery van was parked at the curb. The words MID-CITY FLORISTS were intertwined around a depiction of a single long-stemmed red rose. George felt, inside his gut, a wordless pang of disappointment, and knew what it was. He had been hoping—irrationally, he knew; it could never happen, not now—hoping to see Matt’s car out there. And that would have been Matt ringing the doorbell.
Just like old times—as humans would say. He smiled ruefully at his own foolishness. With his finger, he pushed around on the game board a blank tile.
He could hear his daughter Emily’s voice, behind him and around the corner. “Yes?”
“Hi.” That was the delivery man’s voice. “This is for a, uh—” probably checking the tag “—Mrs. Francisco.”
“Mom, look!” Emily’s voice was happily excited.
Susan had gone to the front door. “Who would send me flowers?”
“I got them—”
“Here.”
“Hey, thanks.” The delivery man must have gotten a tip from Susan.
George glanced over from the baby gurgling in its bassinet, and watched the delivery man, a skinny human in a white shirt and trousers, walk back to the van and drive off.
“Look at this!” Emily carried the flowers into the living room. The arrangement was so big that she had to lift it with both hands around the wicker basket. Chrysanthemums, in several different colors, spilled over the sides. He couldn’t recognize most of the other varieties.
“Well, they are cut flowers.” Susan leaned over the basket, poking among the blooms. “But still, they are pretty . . .”
A human must have sent them; it was one of those strange things about humans, that they didn’t see anything wrong with the pretty, but dead, bits of plants. Maybe somebody at the station. He didn’t suppose it could have been Matt. Even if his ex-partner had decided to send flowers as some sort of apology—slightly less likely than the Earth spontaneously reversing its direction of rotation—why would Matt have sent them to Susan?
“Mmmm . . .” Emily put her face to the blooms and inhaled deeply. “Smell them!” She raised the basket toward her mother.
Susan closed her eyes as she breathed in the mingled fragrance. “Lovely . . .” She looked over at her husband. “George, are these from you?”
He shook his head as he stood up from the living room carpet. “No—I’m afraid cut flowers are still just a little too human for me.”
Poking through the green foliage, Susan had found a small, square envelope.
Emily stood on tiptoe to see. “Who’re they from?”
“Well, let’s find out.” Susan opened the envelope and took out the card inside. “ ‘You’re far lovelier than these flowers,’ ” she read aloud. “And then it’s signed . . . ‘An Admirer.’ ”
He had been standing at the front window, the side of his face close to the glass, trying to see if the florist’s delivery van was still in sight. Something about it had started to nag at his mind, though he had known there was nothing visibly wrong with it or the man who’d brought the flowers to the door. Still, if he could catch a glimpse of the van’s license plate, he could run it through the system at work . . .
He was standing there when he heard his wife read the card. An Admirer . . . His breath slowed, thickening in his chest, as though time itself had stopped.
Susan and Emily turned their startled faces toward him as he rushed—too slow, already too slow—across the room, his hand rising above his head.
He struck the basket out of his daughter’s grasp. The flowers exploded in bright confusion across the floor.
Lorraine had gone back to the kitchen for something. That left Sikes out in the front of his apartment, with the greasy paper bags and scraps from the takeout feast scattered all over the coffee table. He put his feet up on the table’s edge, balancing a half-empty bottle of Red Stripe on his stomach. The rest of the six-pack’s dead soldiers—Lorraine had had two of them; he’d worked his way through the others—were lined up neatly beside the couch. He’d figured Jamaican food called for Jamaican beer, so before she’d gotten there, he’d trotted out to the liquor store—not the little one on the corner, but the yupped-out one a couple of blocks away, with all the import brands—and fetched the necessaries.
The low level of alcohol in his blood, and the good, cheap food in his gut, made him feel easy and slow. This ain’t so bad, sport—he took another hit from the bottle. Count your blessings. He wasn’t exactly happy, but the sadness was at least something small enough to pick up and examine, and think about.
Like that whole business with George. Detective Two Francisco. Whatever—he knew he’d really screwed that one up. Maybe he should’ve just bitten his tongue, shut up, and rolled with it. Maybe gotten off his butt and put in for Two again himself; maybe George could’ve given him some pointers on the exam. Or if he couldn’t have swallowed that much of his pride, if he couldn’t go on working with George as his partner, why not just say so? Open his mouth and emit words like a reasonable human being? Instead of wrestling around on some friggin’ dock, like a couple of kids. He sighed, rubbing the bottle’s cool glass against his forehead. What a jerk—the words applied to both of them.
Now he’d have to break in a whole new partner. Somebody he didn’t even know—there wasn’t anybody unassigned at the station. That meant the precinct would have to post for a transfer. With his luck, he’d get one of those clowns from the Westside who thought police work meant filling out the paperwork for an insurance claim on some movie producer’s Rolls.
Christ—he shook his head, gazing at the dead TV across the room. I’d rather work with . . . with Albert Einstein. The station’s broom pusher, not the famous dead guy. It struck him that that actually wasn’t a bad idea. Albert had some real potential. He’d been impressed with the stunt the janitor had pulled off with those punks in the alley. Most people, human or Newcomer, when they had to think fast, wound up not thinking at all, but just reacting. They either turned and zipped out of the heavy scene, or they got the adrenaline pump going—or whatever Newcomers had instead—and went for the straight frontal attack. One against three, Albert would’ve gotten his clock cleaned. But reaching over and grabbing the dumpster, something so big and clunky that its weapon potential was usually overlooked—doing that was like an example of what that guy on PBS was always calling ‘lateral thinking.’ Ol’ Albert wasn’t as dumb as he appeared. He wasn’t likely to be made a cop, either.
Besides—Sikes took another sip of beer—maybe he really did want to work with a human partner again. For a change.
Lorraine came back into the room, wiping her hands on a paper towel. She flopped down on the couch, putting her feet up next to his.
“Oh, man . . .” She tilted her head back, brown hair draped across the worn cushion. “I am so full . . . I could throw up.”
His hand with the beer in it froze halfway to his mouth.
She laughed. “Just kidding!”
There you go, pal. He drank, and told himself again to count his blessings. A lot of guys, better-looking and smarter than him, could’ve blown it with someone like Cathy, and they’d have wound up sitting by their lonesomes and eating microwaved crap-ola. And here he was, having just skated away from the flaming wreckage of his heart, straight over to a bellyful of jerk chicken and a genuine, living female-type presence right in his apartment. Human, even. Yeah, and wasn’t that what you wanted? Well, you got it. She sme
lled good, and was good-looking, and there’d been a time when her sense of humor would’ve exactly matched his. Everything tonight would probably happen just the way it was supposed to. So shut up, fool.
“Tell me something.” Lorraine curled her legs up under her on the sofa. “Would you rather I hadn’t come over tonight?”
He jumped on that one, to make sure there wasn’t the slightest pause, the least sign of his brain trying to come up with an answer. “Why?” He didn’t want to blow everything twice in a row.
“Oh, I don’t know . . .” She looked away from him, her eyes shaded by their lashes. “It’s like you’re not really here.”
No, it’s because I’m a huge jerk. He shook his head. “Sorry. It’s been a hell of a day.” He forced a smile. “I’m glad you came. Really.”
He tilted the bottle up, to get the last bit. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. The sudden contact startled him; the beer splashed across the front of his shirt.
“Oh, God!” Lorraine looked at him, her eyes wide. He had jumped to his feet, away from her. “I’m sorry . . .” She stood up next to him, blotting the wet shirt with the paper towel she’d brought from the kitchen.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it . . .” He started unbuttoning the shirt.
“I should’ve known better.” Lorraine shook her head ruefully. “I should never try romantic moves.”
“No, really; don’t sweat it.” He peeled off the shirt. “I’ll just go change, and then . . . everything’ll be fine.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulder, bending down to smile into her eyes. “We’ll just pick up where we left off. Okay?”
“I’m such a klutz . . .”
“No, you’re not.” The shirt in his hand had started to drip on the floor. “Look, just hang out here for a second. I’ll be right back.”
She raised her face, and caught his gaze. Then she was in his arms; he felt the press of her hands against the bare skin of his shoulder blades and spine.
Somebody knocked at the door.
The pounding noise rolled through the apartment. Sikes didn’t take his face away from Lorraine’s. “They’ll go away,” he murmured, mouth close to her ear.
“Matt!” The urgency in the voice outside was barely muffled by the door. “Matt, it’s Cathy!”
Something was wrong; he could hear it. Something bigger than anything that had happened between the two of them. He pulled away from Lorraine and hurried to the door.
Cathy stood in the hallway, her fist raised to knock again. The relief her face showed when he opened the door quickly disappeared.
“What is it?” The cooler air of the hall brushed against his skin. “What’s wrong?”
“I just got a call from my medical center.” Cathy’s hand touched his arm. “It’s the Francisco family—they’ve been taken to the intensive care unit—”
“What?”
“It’s that bacteria—they’ve been exposed . . .”
The words knocked him back for a moment, before his brain kicked in. “Okay. Look, lemme go get a shirt on . . .”
He turned and sprinted toward the bedroom. As he went past Lorraine, he knew that she and Cathy were staring at each other. But he didn’t care. Not now.
Rawling was being a fool. Going on about dropping off the flowers, as though it were some sort of major commando raid. Gassing on about it, with all sorts of details, to the others assembled in the warehouse. Guerin hadn’t appreciated before what a penchant for talk Rawling had—that wasn’t a good sign. People who started out talking often ended up talking, to the wrong people. Something might have to be done about Rawling. Silence was a virtue in this kind of operation, and there were ways of making silence permanent.
Coils of razor wire topped the fence behind the warehouse. In the tiny open space, cramped by rusting scrap metal, Guerin poked the fire inside the incinerator. The Rawling problem didn’t have to be taken care of right away, but it was probably not a good idea to put it off for much longer. Things were going to start happening fast, and cracks always appeared under pressure.
The stick in Guerin’s hand stirred up black ashes and dancing sparks. It reminded him of backyard barbecues on warm summer nights, when he’d been a kid. But this wasn’t dying charcoal briquettes and hamburger grease; it was the last of Rawling’s white shirt and trousers, the florist delivery man’s uniform. Rawling hadn’t wanted to change out of the clothes—they were props for his stirring account of his deeds—and Guerin had finally been forced to order him to do so. That was another mark in a ledger kept inside Guerin’s head, marks that would be toted up to determine Rawling’s continued usefulness to the organization. Or lack of same.
A rectangle of bright light slanted across the open space. Guerin turned around from the fire. Another Purist, a quiet one whom he could trust, leaned out, hand on the doorknob. “News is coming on.”
He stirred the flames higher, then followed the younger man inside.
The sound and voices from the television’s speaker bounced around the warehouse’s high-ceilinged space. A thick industrial extension cord snaked across the concrete floor. Rawling, in jeans and sweatshirt now, stood watching with a group of the others; he seemed sullen for the moment, but at least he was quiet.
“Here it is . . .”
The anchorman cut to the amateur video of the explosion out on the water. Guerin, arms folded, watched the same burst of flame and plume of smoke he’d seen earlier in the day, in real life. “All right,” one of the other Purists murmured in appreciation. The tourist had had the presence of mind to get a good shot, keeping the explosion in focus and in the center of the frame, and staying with it while the pieces of flaming debris fell hissing into the ocean. Guerin felt his own satisfaction with the sequence. The camcorder’s angle had been completely away from the buildings at the side of the marina, including the one he’d stationed himself on top of. The police could analyze this tape all they wanted, use every computer-enhancement technique they had in their labs, and they wouldn’t be able to catch any sign of him. That pleased him. He hated loose ends left lying about.
The news changed to something about the panda bears at the zoo.
“Okay, show time’s over.” Guerin picked up the remote control and switched off the television. “Let’s get back to work.” There were still lots of preparations to finish, getting ready for the big days to come.
The group broke up, everyone going back to their assigned tasks. Guerin was about to head back outside, to churn the clothing ashes into black dust, when he heard a familiar sound from the building’s front entrance. The click sound of a woman’s high heels.
“Hello, Marc.” Darlene Bryant smiled coolly as she walked toward him. A pair of bodyguards trailed behind her, their unsmiling gazes scoping out the interior of the warehouse. She had on an evening gown, a severely elegant black sheath that set off her perfect skin. A small fur wrap protected her bare shoulders. “Working so late? How admirable.”
She must’ve been at some party or reception, Guerin knew. One of those stops on her social circuit that formed her public life. They weren’t meant for pleasure, at least not on her part; she got a good deal of the Purists’ business done at those events, contacts made and funds raised. It was a world she swam in with a predator’s ease.
“No sleep till doomsday.” Guerin gave the same smile back to her. “Come over here. I got something to show you.”
He led her to the production lab that had been set up, filling one side of the warehouse. The tech crew was still busy, unpacking equipment. At the central table, Guerin plucked a single capped test tube from a wire rack, and held it up for Bryant’s inspection. A thick, cloudy fluid came halfway up the tube.
“That’s it?” Bryant reached out and tapped one of her long fingernails against the cylinder.
Guerin nodded. “Let’s just say it’s Richard Parris’s legacy to the movement.”
“Ah. Then I’m sure it will come up to his high standards of . . . cra
ftsmanship.” She tilted her head, turning a slightly colder smile to Guerin. “I saw the news this evening. Very interesting. Quite dramatic, actually. Tell me . . .” Her smile went closer to ice. “Why did you blow up the boat?”
“We were having a little problem with Mr. Parris. He wanted money, and he wouldn’t negotiate on the price. He was asking . . . let’s see if I remember it right . . .” Guerin looked up at the ceiling. “One million three hundred and forty-nine thousand dollars.”
“My, such an exact figure.”
A shrug. “That was what he’d calculated he’d been screwed out of by Onyx. He’d gotten kind of fixated on the amount. So . . . it was considerably cheaper to take care of him another way.”
Bryant’s eyelids lowered to slits. “That showed quite a bit of initiative on your part. Didn’t it?”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
Her face hardened, as though the tissues beneath the skin had been pulled taut. She never reacted well to these reminders that there were still levels in the Purist hierarchy above her.
It wasn’t good to push her; they still had to function together. With his other hand, he gestured toward the lab. “We’ve got everything we need. It’ll take about two weeks to produce enough bacteria to spray L.A. County. Thirty-six hours after that, they’ll all be dead.”
She managed a brittle smile. “You’ve done a good job, Marc. For the first time in six years, I feel as if there’s hope.”
The parasites had arrived six years ago. And the Purists had been growing in number, and working, since then.
“Soon . . .” She stroked the test tube with her fingertip, lovingly. “Soon we’ll look back on these creatures as if they were just a bad dream.”
Working for the day. That was soon to dawn.
Her smile had warmed. “Good night, Marc. Get some rest.”
The bodyguards followed her out.
Guerin set the tube gently back in the rack. The light caught it just right, imparting a subtle radiance to the contents, as though it were the milk of a new sun.
