Ollie said, “Lyda…”
I was shaking, and couldn’t stop myself. Some neural pathways are so old, the grooves so deep, you’re forced to realize that you’re an animal first. Reason, choice, self-control? They all showed up late to the evolutionary party.
“The chemjet,” I said. “We need the chemjet.”
Ollie walked toward the bathroom and I rose to follow her. She pulled open the door. Immediately she put up a hand to have me stay back, but I stepped forward.
Luke, the skinny black kid who’d led us here a day ago, slumped on the toilet. I recognized him despite the plastic garbage bag cinched tight over his face like a superhero mask.
The chemjet was gone. The wire crates still sat on the floor of the shower stall, and a few remnant plastic tubes coiled around the drain, but the printer was gone, along with the boxes of c-packs.
“It’s got to be here!” I left the bathroom and slammed open the door to the office, but the printer wasn’t there either. I headed for the sanctuary. Ollie grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around. I was still shaking.
“It’s not here,” she said. “And we have to go.”
“Wait. Where are his clothes?”
“The naked guy’s?”
I found them in the warehouse: shoes, jeans, and T-shirt folded neatly and stacked on one of the wire shelves. I set aside the shirt and turned out the pants pockets, discovering keys, a smart pen, a wallet. I opened the wallet. Ollie watched me, confused. “What are you looking for?”
In the wallet was the usual: cash, credit cards, receipts. I handed her all the loose paper. “Check for rice paper,” I said. “Anything that looks like designer print.”
I marched back to the bathroom. I crouched beside Luke, trying not to look up at his face, and pushed a hand into his front pocket. It was empty. I reached across him to the other pocket. He gave off an earthy smell. How long had he been dead: an hour, a day?
There was nothing in the other pocket but some loose change. So, the back pockets, then. I took a breath, held it, then leaned hard into him, shifting him off one butt cheek. I worked a hand into his back pocket, and pulled out a square of stiff plastic like a miniature wallet.
I let go, and Luke slid off the toilet with a sickening thud.
I opened the plastic holder. Inside was a strip of paper with a single word printed on it. “Logos.”
Ollie appeared in the doorway. “Got it,” I said.
“Good,” Ollie said. “Let’s go.”
She pushed me to the back door, then said, “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“A little cleanup.” She disappeared back into the building.
I stepped outside, and the back parking lot was empty. Where the hell was Bobby? I went down the steps, spun around stupidly. I put the mini-wallet into my pocket and reached for Fayza’s flip phone. I was about to dial when a pair of headlights turned the corner.
I backed up to the wall of the store. Bobby’s hybrid whined to a halt. “Where the fuck did you go?” I asked him.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! You guys were taking so long, then I saw a car and I thought it was the cops, so I—”
“Never mind.” I jumped in the back. “Shut off the lights.”
“What happened? Where’s Ollie? Where’s the printer?”
“Somebody got there first,” I said.
A minute passed, then two. Finally Ollie appeared. She shut the door behind her and climbed into the car. “Did you have to touch everything?” she said. But she was smiling.
“Drive,” I told Bobby.
* * *
“So what does it mean?” Bobby asked. “That word on the paper?”
We were the only three people in the harshly lit dining room of a twenty-four-hour Lebanese restaurant. Ollie sat on my side of the booth, her arm against mine, her hand on my knee. With her free hand she rummaged through a plate of falafel, three different dishes of fried vegetables, and a bowl of hummus. Driving the hospital food out of her system, she said. Bobby was deconstructing his baklava, eating it layer by layer like an archeologist. Me, I was just gripping a coffee, braced for the approach of sirens. I had no appetite. I kept picturing the awl in Pastor Rudy’s neck, the bag over Luke’s head …
“Lyda?” Bobby said. “What logos are they talking about?”
“Log-ose,” Ollie said. “It’s Greek.”
“Ding. Two points,” I said.
“For Gryffindor!” Bobby said.
“Gryffindor doesn’t play basketball,” Ollie said.
“The word means ‘word.’ ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God—’”
“And the word was God,” Ollie said. Her eyes narrowed. “So you are religious.”
“I was raised by a schizophrenic Southern Baptist,” I said. “But it didn’t affect me.”
“Obviously,” she said. She was grinning, almost giddy. Seeing the bodies hadn’t seemed to faze her. And now she was flirting with me, leaning into me like an Iowa cheerleader in the front seat of a Ford pickup. Jesus Christ, what had I started?
Bobby asked me, “So are you going to eat it?” Meaning the paper.
“No, of course not.” I would have torn off a piece and swallowed it, if I’d known which letter had been printed with the drug. Or it could be that the dosage was on every letter, or evenly distributed across the word. I couldn’t afford to damage my one sample with a taste test.
“I need access to a lab,” I said. “And one special machine.”
Ollie squeezed my arm. “Where do we steal it from?” She was wide awake and ready to knock over banks.
“I’m cutting you off,” I said. I pulled out the phone and slid out of the booth. “I’ll be right back.”
Ollie stopped me. “What is that?” Staring at the phone. I heated with embarrassment, which annoyed me, because I didn’t think I had anything to be embarrassed about.
“Fayza gave me a phone,” I said.
Bobby said, “So how come you’re always borrowing mine?”
“She did not give you a phone,” Ollie said. “She gave you a tracking device. Give me that.”
“You’re going to do something to it.”
“Yes I am. Give it.”
She snapped it in half, then pried off the back and tore out the electrical innards. She picked out the tiny battery and popped it free from the chip, then crushed the chip with the salt shaker.
“Yikes,” Bobby said.
Ollie said, “Didn’t you wonder why she gave it to you?”
“I thought so she would know the call came from me. Maybe she has a whitelist. Or special encryption…”
Ollie was shaking her head before I’d gotten halfway through the sentence. “From now on we use burners. No personal phones.”
Bobby made a move to leave. “Bathroom.”
“You too, kid,” I said.
“But my apps! I have videos!”
Ollie said, “Relax, you can get it all back from your backups.”
Bobby morosely took his pen from his pocket and slid it to her. She destroyed it as thoroughly as she had Fayza’s device, then withdrew a new pen from the breast pocket of her camo jacket. She played with it for half a minute, activating it, then handed it to me. “Never been used,” she said. “We’re getting some Wi-Fi here, so I set it to reroute through an anonymizer server, so receivers shouldn’t be able to pick up our location. Later I’ll set up a hopper network so we can use the cell phone towers.”
I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. What was a hopper network?
Ollie saw my look and said, “What? This is what you sprung me for, right? These are basic countermeasures.”
“I get all hot when you do spy talk,” I said.
“Oh jeez,” Bobby said. He went to the bathroom, sans pen.
Ollie stopped me before I walked off to make my call. “I know you’re upset,” she said.
“And you don’t seem to be at all.”
; “I’ve seen bodies before.” She shrugged. “Also, I’m in a weird state, chemically. I’m not sure if I’m reacting appropriately. Like, I can’t stop thinking about this falafel—it’s fantastic.”
“Ha.”
She glanced up to make sure Bobby was out of earshot. “We need to figure out who killed them,” she said. “Was it the drug dealer?”
“Fayza has no reason to do anything with the pastor, not yet. I haven’t given her the results of the test.”
“But she thinks it’s the Little Sprout drug. So she kills them now, and if it turns out they weren’t using that particular drug, she still kills them—because they’re competing with her.”
“Ollie, come on, Fayza can’t be that—” I was about to say “paranoid.” But of course she could; she was a drug lord. Paranoia had to be one of the prerequisites for the job. “So this is what? Some low-level drug war?”
“Maybe not low-level,” Ollie said. “Your pastor was Mexican Mafia.”
“Wait, really?”
“He had the tattoos.”
“So he’s, what? Mexican cartel?”
“La eMe’s primarily a prison gang, but it became attached to the cartels.”
“I thought they all wiped each other out in the twenties.”
“The old gangs aren’t gone, just absorbed when the organizations from Ghana and Nigeria moved in.”
“I didn’t think he was faking the spirituality,” I said. The pastor had seemed so calm and centered. Or maybe he was a user as well as a dealer. So Fayza takes him out, and then—
“I just had a bad thought,” I said. “As soon as I give Fayza the results, she has no use for me.”
“True,” Ollie said.
“Jesus, you’re not supposed to just agree with me when I say shit like that! Say something encouraging.”
She thought for a moment. “You’re not a threat to her,” she said. “Not much of one. You’re not manufacturing, so you’re not a competitor. As a subject-matter expert, you could even be of critical use to her if she wants to manufacture the drug itself.”
“I’m not going to let her have the recipe,” I said. “That’s the whole point of this. Nobody gets to make NME One-Ten. Not Fayza, not Edo, not anybody.”
“Oh.” She put down her fork. “Then she’s going to try to kill you.”
“Damn it, Ollie.” I wasn’t mad at her, not really. I was pissed with myself for not taking the printer when I’d had a chance. I hadn’t even gotten a picture of it. Dr. G had recognized something about the engine, but then never got around to telling me what it was. And now she was no longer talking to me.
Bobby ambled toward us. He looked worried. “Are you guys fighting?” he said.
“Don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy still love you very much,” I said. “I need to make a call.”
I stepped outside the restaurant. The temperature had dropped to just above freezing, and the cold, wet air first jolted me, then immediately made me more tired than before. I was not used to being out this late while sober. The streets were mostly empty. No flashing lights in the distance, no sirens.
I fumbled with Ollie’s pen. The interface was older than I was used to, but I managed to search for Rovil’s info and call him. No one picked up. I decided to forgive him because it was the middle of the night. I left a message telling him to call this new number.
Ollie and Bobby came out of the restaurant. I assumed that Ollie had paid. In the car she leaned into me and said, “I can’t go back to that tiny apartment.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been sleeping on hospital beds for two years,” she said. “I want a king-size mattress and you next to me. I want to sleep until noon, have sex without inmates listening to us, and then call room service.”
“You’re wired,” I said. “There’s no way you’re getting to sleep.”
“Okay, sex ’til noon, then room service, then sleep. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Let me just try to call Rovil one more—”
She plucked the pen from my fingers. “Bobby,” she said, “drop us at the Marriott.”
* * *
Sometime later I woke to bright light. I opened my eyes to slits, expecting a winged messenger of God, but it was only the morning sun firing up the gauzy drapes of the hotel window. The bed was empty. Where was Ollie? Then I heard the shower going.
I found my T-shirt draped over Ollie’s big black duffel bag and pulled it on. My shoulder burned from some abrasion. The backs of my thighs ached and my crotch felt sore; the price of sex with a tiny, intense Filipino girl on speed. Ollie had seemed to possess more than one pair of hands, manipulating my body with the fervor and efficiency of an Indy pit crew. Power tools may have played a role. I was already exhausted before we got to the hotel room, so my main responsibility over those two hours was to stay on the bed. I was not entirely successful.
I pushed aside the drapes and squinted at the planet. The room was on the tenth floor, and I looked down on Bay Street at full morning rush. Not a pretty sight. Each lane was a conveyor belt for delivering boxed humans into the mouths of hungry corporations. All those people, thinking that they were unique and special. A million brains throwing off waves of stupidity and pettiness and banality, thinking, I gotta lose weight, I should have charged my pen, Why didn’t I leave that idiot? The telepaths of the NAT had to be fakes, I thought. Any real mind-readers would have shot themselves at the earliest opportunity.
I managed to find my jeans. The pen Ollie had given me last night was in the back pocket, pulsing with a message alert.
It was Rovil. He’d returned my call an hour ago. I pulled on my clothes, then called him back. He answered in seconds.
“Did you get Edo’s address?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” Rovil said. “I’m trying. I’ve left messages everywhere. I didn’t want to be too … indiscreet. I’ve contacted friends in my social network, however, and I’m hoping somebody will have a number.”
“Thanks, kid. Keep trying. Now, do you have access to a GC-MS machine?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Come on—gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. One-stop shopping for all your molecular identification needs.”
“I know what one is,” he said. “I was just surprised by the question. And the answer is yes, there are several at work.”
“I mean private access. Where you could look at something without having it reported.”
His eyebrows arched. “You found samples?”
“Just one,” I said. “I can FedEx it to you.”
“Amazing! Where did you get it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it just yet.”
He thought for a moment. “If you mail it to my home, I could take it in after hours.”
“You rock.”
He laughed, and I told him I’d get it to him right away.
Ollie came out of the bathroom while I was pulling on my boots. She wore a white hotel robe. Wet hair shining, skin glowing. She seemed ten years younger than she had in the NAT. She looked me over, taking in the information that I was already dressed. She glanced at the duffel bag, the window, then back to me.
“I thought you were maybe talking to her,” she said. “But she’s not here, is she?”
“Dr. Gloria? How do you know that?”
“There’s a thing you do with your eyes when she’s around. You can’t look at someone straight on for too long—your pupils jump around, up to the right, then back again.”
“I—I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not that noticeable. So where is she?”
“We had a disagreement.”
“So that’s good, right? No hallucinations?”
“Oh yeah, it’s great.”
She frowned. “You want her back.”
“She’s useful,” I said. “Sometimes.”
“What can an invisible, imaginary angel do for you?”
“You’d be surprised. Have you looked at the news ye
t?”
Ollie decided to overlook my blatant change of subject. “There’s nothing about a double murder,” she said. “I don’t think the bodies have been discovered.”
“Cool.” I stood up and grabbed my jacket. “Listen, I have to run an errand.”
“I was serious about the room service,” she said.
“You order without me. I’ve got to mail the sample to Rovil. I’ll be back in a half hour, hour at the latest.”
She regarded me silently. Something had closed down in her face.
I knew this would be a problem. Sex would mean more to her than it would to me. And as soon as I didn’t act as she expected, she would look for data to explain that—and we’d be off and running on the Paranoia Express.
I kissed her. “Croissants and a pot of hot coffee,” I said. “That’s all I want.”
* * *
I held the open FedEx envelope in one hand, and the sheet of rice paper in the other. I didn’t want to put the paper inside and send away my only connection to Numinous. But what choice did I have? I needed the verification Rovil could provide.
I called up his home address—his apartment building was called “The Ludlow,” which sounded tony—waved it onto the package’s smart label, then dropped the envelope into the FedEx box.
I walked for fifteen, twenty minutes, looking for a quiet place to sit down. Here in downtown the sidewalks were crowded with young people in an array of skin tones, wearing clothing I could no longer afford. Canada, unlike the United States, was still a predominately white nation, but not in Toronto. You could see the future here. This was the final century for my species, the Pale North American Red-Crested Bitch. Good riddance.
I found a tiny courtyard between two buildings that had the tidy, curated feel of a nationally mandated green space, and sat down on a marble bench. The cold stone immediately numbed my backside. On the next bench sat a homeless man, probably Caucasian, with wild gray hair and a face ruddy from long exposure to sun and wind and snow. He wore several layers of clothing and guarded a black garbage bag of belongings. He was talking to no one I could see, speaking in a low, angry voice. I figured I’d fit right in.
I waited until no one was passing by on the sidewalk, and then I said aloud, “I’m sorry.” When Dr. Gloria was being difficult, talking silently in my head was no good. She wanted audible respect. “Did you hear me?” I said, louder. “I’m sorry.”
Afterparty Page 9
