by Hopkin, Ben
“We are going up.”
This model of railway car had two ladders, one on the back, one on the front. Both only went halfway up the side. Trey would have to climb the ladder with Darc on his back.
Darc began to sit on Trey’s shoulders, and his partner squawked. “Hold on! You’re getting on my shoulders? C’mon, man! I can barely climb that ladder on my own. How about you carry me up?”
“Can you ascertain and then contain the threat?”
There was a momentary pause, and then Trey muttered, “No.” He pushed himself to his feet, Darc perched precariously on his shoulders.
“Holy cow, man. You’ve got to lay off the fried eggs.”
There were several studies that had recently been conducted on egg consumption that would counter Trey’s suggestion, but it seemed irrelevant considering the current circumstances. For this reason, Darc chose to remain silent on the subject as Trey strained to climb the ladder.
As Trey reached the final rung, the informational flow of color verified what Darc had already guessed. “I will need to stand on your shoulders.”
“Of course you will. Because my life sucks,” groaned his partner, wrapping his arms around the sides of the ladder. “Okay. Go for it.”
Pulling his legs out from in front of Trey’s chest, Darc gripped one of the ridges of the car to balance himself as he placed his feet on each of Trey’s shoulders. The added height allowed him to reach the lip of the roof.
He grabbed a hold with both hands, pulling himself up far enough that he could fling one elbow over the edge. A swing of his leg, and he was able to pull himself up and over. Darc rolled onto the surface of the roof, lifting himself up to survey the threat.
There was nothing there.
The rooftop was empty. No explosives. No symbols.
Nothing whatsoever.
Darc had chosen which path to follow and had chosen incorrectly. Three paths, none of them confirmed, only one about which he could do anything. And it was not this.
The countdown continued in his head. There were five seconds still remaining until the blast. No time to clear the deadly blast radius, not even for Trey.
He lay back on his side, waiting for the explosion to occur. His body relaxed, muscles that he had not been aware he was tensing releasing. Possibly for the first time.
When it came, the end would almost be welcome.
* * *
Trey was doing what he could to keep track of how close they were to death. He knew the running and the lifting and the climbing had probably thrown him off, but by his count, they should be in a billion little pieces slowly drifting down to earth right about now. The fact that they weren’t was fantastic, but every muscle was tensed, waiting for the doom that was sure to follow.
“Trey!”
The sound of his name from below sent Trey into a full-on epileptic seizure. He spasmed and jerked around, forgetting for a brief second that he was on a ladder fifteen feet above the ground.
He remembered as he was on his way down.
The landing drove all thoughts back out. His breath left him in a whoosh of air, and it felt like every bone in his body had been rattled and possibly shattered. He groaned out his pain into the dust and gravel in which his face lay.
“Oh, Trey, I’m so sorry.” Mala’s voice came to him from somewhere above his head. Wait. How had that happened? Hadn’t he been up in a ladder?
Oh. Right.
Trey rolled over with caution, not wanting to let the pain have an opportunity to gather any of its nasty pain buddies around for company. There was something urgent going on. What was it? Something that had to do with the fact that Mala was here right now. It was right on the tip of his tongue.
Then it came to him.
“Get out! She’s going to blow!” He yelled, then immediately regretted it, as stabs of pain shot through his chest. Maybe taking headers off a ladder wasn’t such a good idea. Note for later.
If he made it that far.
“Don’t worry, Trey. Janey took care of it,” came the completely unexpected response from Mala. Trey looked up, ignoring the lancing agony that shot up his spine.
There was Janey, holding what looked like a black box with a bunch of wires sticking out of it. She was grinning so wide it looked like her face might split down the middle.
“Whoa,” he breathed, staring at the girl and the device. “You came back with her in tow?”
Mala’s face tightened. “It was a difficult decision. I—”
“No, no,” Trey protested, waving his hand and then regretting it. “I’m not second guessing you. I’m trying to thank you. If you hadn’t been here…”
“We would have died,” finished Darc, who then hung down from the lip of the roof and then dropped to the ground. He stood, brushing himself off.
How the hell had he done that? Trey had dropped from less than half that height, and he was ready to take a sick day. Actually, no. Sick week. Hell. Sick month.
Darc came forward and crouched down in front of Janey. He held out his hand for the device she was holding. She placed it in his palm and then held up her bear for Darc to kiss, which he did without a moment’s hesitation.
Man, that guy had come a long way.
Turning the black box over in his hands, Darc stood and peered more intently at Mala. “Where did you find this?”
Mala pointed over inside the circle, to a spot about twenty yards away from the burning pit of crude oil. “She took me right over there and just started digging. The fire from the hole was tough to deal with, but she kept at it until she had that thing in her hands.”
“The Golden Spiral. That was the significance of the center car.” Darc placed his hand on Janey’s shoulder and murmured something to her that Trey couldn’t hear. Whatever it was made Janey’s smile grow even larger.
“Okay,” Trey said, trying to lever himself up to standing. “I guess we should open up this sucker, right?”
Mala moved to his side, putting her neck down under the crook of his arm to support him. They were moving toward the car when Darc stopped them.
“Wait.” He turned to Janey. “Is it safe?”
The little girl paused and seemed to think for a moment. Then she nodded and began skipping toward the container.
“Looks like we’re good,” Trey said, stifling a groan as Mala’s elbow accidentally went into his side. “But what was that about?”
Darc turned and fixed his gaze on Trey. “To what are you referring?”
Did his partner really not understand what was going on, or was he being deliberately obtuse. “How does Janey know what you don’t?”
There was a long moment where Darc didn’t respond. Then he just shrugged his shoulder and turned toward the boxcar.
“She sees things that I do not.”
Wow.
That was the biggest admission of frailty Trey had ever heard out of his partner. Ever. He wanted to take a second to take that in, but they were back on the move toward the sliding door of the large rectangular container in front of them.
As Darc began pulling at the door, Mala walked Trey over to where he could lean against the side while she helped. The squeal of the metal almost covered over another sound. A sound that was a huge relief to Trey.
Sirens.
He looked at Mala, who was just finishing up with the door. Raising an eyebrow, Trey gestured with his head at the horns blaring in the distance. Mala blushed and turned away before answering.
“Backup seemed like a good idea. So… I called. Sue me.”
“Hey,” Trey answered. “Far as I’m concerned, that just means that drugs are on their way.”
Trey hobbled over to the open door, peering inside. The light of the fire behind them almost made their flashlights irrelevant, but the beam picked out detail that the flickering orange light left to the imagination.
Maybe that would have been best. There, in the center of the floor, was a triangle. At each of its corners was a severed head,
pools of blood oozing out from the stumps that once had attached them to their bodies. In the center of the triangle, a naked man lay stretched out, a gruesome eye carved into his chest with some sort of blade.
It was the Mayor.
He stirred and groaned, lifting his head up, as if to find the source of the flashlight beams. There was a cough, wet and chesty, that issued forth from his mouth and echoed throughout the interior of the car.
“Mr. Mayor?” Trey addressed him. “About that protection detail…”
* * *
Janey was so tired.
She knew it was important to stay awake at school, so she kept pinching herself all over her arms and legs, but it almost wasn’t working anymore. Popeye said she was going to look like a spotted frog by the time she was done. Nasty bear.
Mala had told her she didn’t need to go today, but Janey had shook her head no. This was the day. The day that everything she had worked so hard for was going to happen. If she didn’t go today, things were going to be bad. Really bad.
So she went to school and did her work and smiled at her teacher even though Mrs. Kingston was looking at her funny. She even sat next to the smelly girl at lunch. Janey knew the girl couldn’t help that she was smelly, and the other kids made fun of her. It didn’t feel good to be made fun of, so Janey sat there, even though it made her peanut butter and honey sandwich taste like feet.
It had been super sweet, too, because the girl started teaching Janey how to say things with her hands. She called it sign language, and she taught Janey how to say I love you. Janey made the sign with her hand again, pulling down her middle finger and her ring finger and sticking out her thumb.
Now she was back in the classroom, right up in front with the teacher and her friends. That was supposed to be a bad thing, because you got moved so you wouldn’t get into trouble, but that wasn’t true. Not this time.
Popeye said something about Mrs. Kingston being dumb. Janey tried not to listen, but it was pretty funny. Maybe that’s why her teacher kept looking at her funny. Because Janey was smiling and almost laughing so much. She told Popeye to be quiet and behave, but he just stuck his tongue out at her. Naughty bear.
She knew she needed to pay attention today, but she kept thinking about last night instead. Helping was so much fun. It had made Janey feel bubbly inside when she found the black box. Bubbly in a good way, not bubbly like when your tummy was sick.
She had known just where it would be. The colored swirling lines inside her head all just pointed to the place.
The colors had told her things about the man who was hurting people. That he liked to trick and then trick and then trick some more.
Like if someone said they spit in your milk so that you would trade with them. Then you start to switch with them but think that’s a trick too, so you end up drinking your own milk. And while you’re switching milks around, you don’t even notice that the person puts a sign on your back that says I’m stupid. Except it was worse than that.
Lots worse.
She wasn’t sure that Darc understood everything that she’d tried to tell him with her drawing last night, but there wasn’t anything else she could do about it now. Right now she had other things to worry about.
It was the last thing she was going to do. If it didn’t work, Janey was pretty sure there wasn’t anything that would work. She was going to get in a lot of trouble no matter what, though, so she really hoped it worked. Like, really, really hoped.
Mala would be upset.
That was the part that Janey hated. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Not really. Especially with all the stuff with that man at the adoption place that didn’t like Mala. He was making things hard.
This was one of those times when Janey knew what was right to do, even though it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. She knew that grownups would try to stop her if they knew about it. Even Mala.
But not Darc. If she explained it to Darc, he would tell her to go ahead and do it. Well, he wouldn’t actually say that, because he didn’t talk that much, and when he did, he used big words. But he would look at her and she would know that he thought it was a good idea.
Janey took a deep breath, hugged Popeye… even though he grumbled the whole time… and raised her hand.
It was time to do this.
* * *
There was something off with the logic strands.
Darc sat at his desk, reviewing information from the files surrounding this case. There were connections here that needed to be examined now that there was a moment in which to do so.
But all of the connections that made sense appeared to be at odds with the colored bands of light. That was not something that Darc had experienced before. Emotion and logic conflicted. Logic did not argue with logic.
There was an underlying pattern here. Of that Darc was assured. But the fact that Janey had found the connections at the crime scene where Darc had been unable to do so was troubling. There was no ego around it for him, but there was the problem of his ability to trust the information that his brain processed.
If it were not for the unsolicited presence of the little girl, there would have been three deaths last night. His, Trey’s and the Mayor’s.
In a situation where Janey could not be present, how could Darc be trusted to ascertain the threat? The lines of light sputtered and spat in protest, but even they had no solutions to the dilemma.
Trey walked into the office, wincing at every step. “How is it that bombs go off all around us and somehow I’m the only one who gets hurt?”
Darc stared at his partner for a moment. “Dodge faster.”
Trey’s head snapped around in a double take. “Was that…? Were you just making a joke?”
This was confusing. Darc could not see what was humorous about either Trey’s injuries or Darc’s solution to the problem. Therefore, he had no way of knowing how he should respond to the question. As so often happened when he was talking to Trey, Darc chose to remain silent.
“Well,” Trey sighed after a pause. “Too bad. I was excited there for a second. You developing a funny bone would be something to write home about.”
“There is no such—”
“I know, I know,” Trey cut in. “There’s no such thing as a funny bone. Ugh.” He released a grunt as he sank carefully into his chair. “Pain sucks.”
Darc turned back to his contemplation of the case file, allowing the streams of logic to pull information from the pages in front of him, finding links and patterns to feed back into the matrix.
“Oh, hey,” Trey added, pulling out a stack of papers of his own. “Got word from the ME’s office. Stopped by on the way in. They’ve identified the victims from the last two crime scenes.”
“The thermite did not consume all the remains in the Greenbelt?”
“Well, no, it mostly did. But there were enough bits and pieces that they were able to do some dental record magic.”
Trey slapped down the papers on Darc’s desk. Darc found multiple threads spinning themselves off the page with the overload of information found there.
“Council members, mafia family and bankers,” Darc said, extracting the information from the streams of color.
“Yeah,” his partner agreed. “Not sure what connection they all have. Put any two of them together and I might get it. But all three? Weird mix.”
Another strand from earlier on entered in and combined with the data assembled. The result was a new color and a thicker flow of intel. There was a link here.
“The lawsuit,” Darc said, the thick, glowing cord pulsing in agreement.
“Lawsuit? Oh, you mean that whatsit thing that the Satanist guy turned us onto?”
The lack of specificity in Trey’s speech was nothing unusual, but the lines of logic always responded poorly, hissing and spitting at the lack of precision and detail. Darc had grown used to this kind of communication, however, and was far less bothered than the filaments of gleaming colors appeared
to be.
“The lawsuit was filed against the Colacurcios family, and alleged that the construction bid they had won was fixed.”
“What’s the project?” Trey asked.
“It is a plan to revitalize the waterfront area. It includes the rebuilding of two piers, as well as improvements to the nearby streets and railroads.”
“That what that Satanist dude was griping about? Sounds like a good thing.”
Darc shook his head. “It may be, but the complaint is that it is adversely affecting the small businesses already down on the waterfront. There are allegations of coercion to sell and governmental abuses.”
“Whoa,” Trey whistled, spinning around in his chair and then wincing as he came to an abrupt stop. “That would have to include the City Council, right? There’s two out of the three.”
“Look more closely at the lawsuit,” Darc said, pushing his file over to Trey.
His partner pulled up the folder, holding it close to his face. An expression began to grow there, one that Darc could not identify. It could have been a dawning realization or the beginnings of a meditative trance. Considering that Trey did not engage in transcendental meditation, Darc concluded it must be the former.
“The bank that the money’s going through… American FirstOne Credit. Same place as the dead bankers,” he breathed. “That’s it. This has to be the link.” He plopped the file back down in front of Darc.
The pathways of logic thrummed in response. The colors were mostly blue and green, signifying a high level of probability. But there were still strands missing. Gaping holes in the structure of the information that refused to allow Darc a complete picture of the situation. Those blank spaces vibrated with their own harmonies, clashing with the harmonics of the tapestry of logic, creating a dissonance that was almost painful.
Darc continued looking over the lawsuit, when a name leapt out, rimmed in orange, that immediately secured itself in one of the empty spaces. There were still gaps, but the relative clarity went up by multiple percentage points.
Pointing with his finger at the name, Darc motioned for Trey to take a look. His partner moved over behind his shoulder, glancing down at the papers.
