The Hound of Justice

by Claire O'Dell

  “Let’s go with all of the above.”

  She smiled, this time with more compassion than amusement, and laid aside her book. “Then I shall fetch you something to eat and drink. Stay away from the window, please. If anyone should knock, do not answer, even if you believe you recognize their voice. Most definitely do not open the door.”

  With that comforting list of instructions, she exited the room. The door swung shut with a loud click.

  Out of curiosity, I levered myself to my feet, my joints creaking and my muscles making their own opinions known, and tried the door handle. It didn’t budge.

  Huh. So, all that talk about not opening the door was nonsense. Was I a prisoner, then, or a valued guest?

  Maybe a little of both.

  I leaned against the door and surveyed my prison—excuse me, safe house. The room was larger than average, but otherwise it looked much like any other you’d find where the motel did their best business with transient workers. Three bunk beds took up most of the floor space. Besides the exit door, there were two more doors, one of them blocked by the beds, the other leading to the bathroom, I guessed. A dirty window, half covered with newspaper, grudgingly admitted the late afternoon sunlight. The air smelled of disinfectant and soap. My caretaker and guardian had left the window open a crack, and I heard a dog barking without much enthusiasm. You and me both.

  The lock clicked open. I jumped away from the door, and the other woman slipped inside, juggling a thermos, a paper sack, and a roll of paper towels in her arms. She took in my presence by the door, but her only reaction was a quirk of her mouth.

  She swung the door shut with one elbow and handed me the thermos.

  “My apologies,” she said. “We have no table or chairs.”

  “Nor fine linen and a wine list,” I replied.

  That provoked a laugh. “Indeed. And I’m afraid the food isn’t much, but you’ll get a proper dinner later.”

  The thermos contained black coffee; the sack contained a fried chicken sandwich wrapped in tinfoil, plus a container of grits and redeye gravy. My caretaker laid out my meal on my bed, along with several paper towels. The coffee was bitter, but it served to wash the scum from my mouth and wake me up. The fried chicken sandwich, on the other hand, was delicious, even if it was cold. I ate it down to the crumbs and licked my fingers. The grits would be hard to manage without a second hand, but at least I no longer felt groggy and starved.

  “Better?” the woman asked. She had locked the door with the interior bolt and remained by the window while I ate.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Much better. Um, what should I call you?”

  “Kite will do.”

  As in the bird, swift and deadly. I decided the name was a warning, so I didn’t press her for an explanation for the locked door, or where exactly Sara and Micha had gone. Were they in a different room in this same motel? And what about dear Lazarus?

  Even so, my face must have given away my thoughts because Kite smiled. “Your bag and your device are under your bed if you need them. The bathroom is over there.” She indicated the other door.

  I scouted the bathroom first. It was tiny but clean, with a toilet, sink, and shower stall crammed into a five-by-five square. Not suitable for tending to my stump, but more than good enough for everything else. I rinsed out my mouth with a handful of water, then splashed more water over my face. Once I felt truly awake, I took an inventory of myself.

  Joints sore. Muscles aching from unaccustomed effort. Nothing surprising, considering the miles we’d spent crawling through that damned tunnel. The bullet graze, at least, showed the best signs. The wound had scabbed over—dear god, it itched—and my stump was in far better shape than I expected, after three days of outright neglect. But I couldn’t put that off any longer.

  Kite had returned to her bunk and her novel. When I came back into the main room, she glanced up, a questioning look.

  “I’ll do,” I said.

  “I’m glad to hear that. It would be an unfortunate waste of everyone’s time otherwise. Do you need help with your device?”

  I bit back my first irritated reply. “No, thank you. I can manage.”

  I wrestled my bag and my device out from under the bed with my one arm, then laid out my supplies on the blanket. We weren’t talking a sterile operating surface, but at least these were genuine field conditions. Kite had thoughtfully left the roll of paper towels on my bunk, and I used those to create a work surface. The antiseptic pads and the powder took longer, but I worried my way through that as well. At last I lay on my bunk, panting, with Lazarus attached.

  Meanwhile, Kite continued to read her novel, seemingly indifferent to me. I could just make out the title and the author’s name. Courtney Milan, The Suffragette Scandal. One of my mother’s favorite books. Only time I ever cried about thimbles, she told me. All those people like to say romance is nothing special. We all need something to take us through the bad times. We all need books where there’s a happy ending.

  Maybe once I got back to DC, I’d look up these books myself.

  “When do you expect the others?” I asked.

  “No more than two hours.”

  I had no cell or watch, and I noted the room had no clock. Well, then.

  “Do you have another book?” I asked.

  “Alas, no.”

  I flung myself back onto my bed. Raised my arm and observed the glitter of brass and steel. Felt a shiver of electricity, like a shiver of life, run down the length of my arm from flesh to metal.

  Time for drills, I thought.

  I flexed my left hand. Lazarus obeyed without the least hesitation. Ten times for each drill, Sydney had told me that first day. Keep at it until you stop thinking about each movement.

  Ain’t no such thing as a magical cure, I thought, but there is such a thing as progress.

  I moved on to the keyboard exercise, running each finger in turn over my imaginary keyboard. A melody worked best, but I was no musician. Instead, I pretended I was Sara, playing her favorite piece, Appassionata.

  Chord by thundering chord, the melody in my imagination rose upward like a host of angels.

  ***

  At sunset, a loud rap sounded at the door.

  Kite slid the paperback under her pillow and materialized next to the door, a gun in one hand. When I started up from my bed, she gestured sharply for me to stand back. I subsided onto the mattress and considered what weapons might be at hand.

  To my great relief, Dane barked out, “Goddammit, what the hell you doing in there? I’ve had a piss-poor day, and all I want to do is take a quick lie-down.”

  Apparently, that was the secret code phrase, because Kite grinned and flipped the bolt open. Dane pushed through the door, followed by three other women. Dane and Sara each carried a bag of groceries. Raven had a bag slung over one shoulder. The third I didn’t recognize at all until she spoke.

  “Doc,” said Micha. “I see you finally woke up.”

  When I’d first encountered Micha face-to-face, back in DC, I’d thought her a stocky woman in her fifties, square built and plain. In Georgia, she’d transformed herself into an elderly man, then a woman of uncertain age with gray hair and callused hands. Now she was a woman in her late thirties or early forties, lean and angular, her hair a soft brown halo around her unlined face.

  “Where is Owl?” Kite demanded.

  “Scouting,” Dane replied. She tossed a manila envelope to me. “Welcome to your new identity, Doc. Please read and memorize.”

  The envelope contained two sets of IDs. One was a small plastic card with an embedded chip for one Callie Mae Johnson, citizen of Oklahoma and the NCR. The other was a stamped and dated permit that allowed the same Callie Mae Johnson to travel between Cloudy, Oklahoma, and the Sooner State Machine Parts factory, her place of employment, during curfew. The photo on the plastic card was close enough to mine. I wasn’t so sure about the bio-identity data stored in the chip, but if Micha had anything to do with this, the d
ata would match my own DNA and fingerprints.

  “Congratulations,” Dane said. “You are now officially part of the cleaning crew.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “How’s the pay?”

  “Top of the line,” Sara told me. “Considering. Eat, while we give you the long-promised explanation.”

  Dinner consisted of biscuits, red beans and rice, and barbecued pork ribs. We had more paper towels for napkins and several cans of Sprite and Diet Coke. As I ate, Sara launched into her explanation.

  “Adler,” she said. “Nadine Adler, youngest sister in that very successful trio who founded Adler Industries and Livvy Pharmaceuticals. The official story claims Nadine died after a shoot-out with government officials, after that incident involving veterans from the New Civil War. But Adler did not die. She used the delay by my superiors to escape from New Jersey and smuggle herself into the headquarters for Adler Industries, where she had an enormous sum of cash stored in a safe in her office. She took that and fled across the border. Costa Rica, my chief said. I said otherwise. An obsession, you called it,” she said softly. “Turns out my obsession is fed by instinct.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “Adler sold those drugs to both sides. The New Confederacy lost as many, maybe even more soldiers than we did. They can’t be happy with her.”

  “They did,” Dane said. “And they’re not. And by they, I mean both the government and any number of ordinary folks. They want those peace talks just as much as the Federal States do. Too many dead. Cities and farms destroyed or abandoned. I doubt the New Confederacy would’ve lasted this long without help from outside.”

  The Russians, I thought. Or the Chinese. Possibly both, each working for their own reasons to keep the United States divided and unstable.

  “So why here?” I said quietly. “Why not Costa Rica after all?”

  “I don’t know,” Sara said. “My guess is that she couldn’t risk traveling so far under a false identity. Better to hide with the enemy until the search for her died down. And it did.” She blew out a breath. “I went to my chief, the day after the Bloody Inauguration. He agreed there might be a connection. A week later, the decision came from on high not to pursue the matter. I waited,” Sara continued. “Then I had my data back.”

  Rose Adler had salvaged the main holdings for Adler Industries, she went on, but the government had shut down Livvy and indicted the four chief officers, plus the head of research. The rest of the employees had been released with a warning to remain in the DC area for the trials.

  “Most had found new jobs,” Sara went on. “Even with the scandal. I tracked them all down. All except one. That one person being a biochemist named Dr. Salmah Sa’id, last sighted on December 10, when she entered her bank to make a withdrawal. That same day, she paid her rent in advance through May, and arranged to have her mail held, both paper and electronic transactions. I checked the airlines and Amtrak, but no one matching her description purchased a ticket or made reservations.”

  Vanished. Just like Katherine Calloway.

  My mouth went dry. I took a swig of soda.

  “That is when Hound made contact with us,” Dane said. “She asked if we’d noticed any unusual activity since November.” She laughed. “There’s always something unusual going on in these parts. Some of that is our fault. Some . . . is because of a group named the Brotherhood of Redemption. They don’t want any peace talks. They don’t want any compromise with the Federal States. For them, it’s all or nothing.

  “Speaking of which . . . Even before Hound sent her message, we knew the Brotherhood had acquired an abandoned factory here in Cloudy—that was back in July. They bought used equipment, hired workers to fill a day shift, all of this under a shell company. And they did manufacture machine parts, which probably helped fund their other activities. So, we kept a watch, noticed a fair amount of traffic at night, as well as day.”

  “Which means,” Sara said, “that when Nadine Adler turned up, asking for refuge in exchange for her services, the Brotherhood was ready. My data sources told me about the patterns of money and equipment, which confirmed Dane’s observations. I went to my chief again. He agreed I had enough evidence, but his chief decided the matter belonged to the CIA. That’s when—”

  Once again, her fingers knotted together, and she drew a deep breath before she continued. “Our beloved government sent an undercover agent to investigate. He was betrayed and executed. That is when I decided to take over the mission.”

  What a typical Sara understatement.

  “We had already infiltrated the cleaning crew by February,” Dane said. “That’s how we discovered the laboratory behind the main factory floor. Ignorant motherfuckers thought because we were black, we had to be stupid as well. At first, we suspected they were working on new explosives—another Bloody Inauguration—but then Hound showed up with her own theory about the missing biochemist.”

  “I couldn’t risk showing my face,” Sara said. “Not with Adler so often on site. However, Dane smuggled a written message from me. A read-and-destroy message. I offered her federal immunity if she would testify about Nadine Adler and the Brotherhood. Three days went by before she answered. I will do it. But they have my sister. You must rescue her as well. And she has need of a surgeon.”

  I growled in frustration. “That’s . . . very vague.”

  “She’s frightened,” Dane said. “She could barely bring herself to talk to me.”

  “But I need more information,” I said. “What kind of surgery? What surgical tools will I need?”

  “That is why you will ask her tonight,” Sara said.

  20

  Eight forty-five P.M. Time for the Sugar Sweet Cleaning Crew to set out for work.

  Raven had mustered up a uniform that nearly fit me. The ugly brown coveralls, made out of cheap synthetic material, itched like hell, but my rubber-soled shoes were durable and sturdy. I tucked my hair underneath the regulation head wrap and pulled on my industrial gloves. The gloves were thick enough that Lazarus’s metal joints were not visible.

  Sara and Micha, I noticed, wore black boots, dark cotton jerseys, and loose camouflage pants. Almost military, and definitely nothing like a Sugar Sweet uniform.

  “You aren’t joining us?” I asked.

  Sara checked over a handgun before she tucked it into a pocket holster. “Too risky,” she said. Her gaze roved over the array of weapons Kite had produced from the blocked-off closet. With a pleased growl, she selected a knife and eyed the blade. The knife evidently passed inspection, because she slid that into a wrist sheath on her left arm.

  “Besides,” Micha said. “We need to do some of our own scouting. No offense to the local experts.” She and Raven exchanged edged smiles, which were not entirely hostile, but also not entirely friendly.

  Huh. Maybe a bit of competition going on there?

  Dane peeked through the window. “Our friends are here. Hound, you and Ferret wait until true dark before you do any scouting. I mean that, hear? Keep to the back roads, and don’t give no sass to anyone, black or white. Doc, Hound says Adler won’t recognize you. Just in case, I want you to be the dumbest, quietest woman in our crew. Just scrub and mop and follow orders. Think you can do that?”

  “Sure can,” I mumbled. “Don’t like scrubbing any toilets, though.”

  Dane’s mouth quirked in a smile. “Close enough, sunshine. Though you might wanna practice your accent on the ride over. Let’s go.”

  Sara and Micha departed with Kite in a red pickup truck. Dane, Raven, and I joined the rest of the crew in the same rusted Buick from the day before. The driver was Owl, a lean white woman whose wispy brown hair was streaked with gray. The other two women, one white and one black, shrugged when I asked their code names.

  “Don’t fret,” Owl said. “We just like to be careful.”

  She eased the car out of the motel parking lot and headed west. Cloudy, Oklahoma, was a nothing little settlement, founded in the early twentieth century an
d known for not having anything to know about it. Nothing and little sure did sum up the town. Cloudy had no real main street, just a state highway running through the center. Besides the motel, the town included the usual collection of gas station, church, and all-purpose grocery store. Coulda been any small town, this side or that of the border. Coulda been Georgia.

  Except, except, all kinds of differences, dontcha know.

  Twilight was fading into dark by the time we reached the factory, which sat atop a small rise, surrounded by wetlands and fields of shoulder-high grass. Once, there’d been farms and a town here as well, like a village outside a medieval fortress. Well, the fortress had fallen during the war, the peasants had fled, and the village no longer existed except for a few broken walls.

  Bright lights atop the factory illuminated the parking lot and the front of the building, which appeared to be in good shape, but here and there were signs of bullets and fire. The barbarians had done some damage.

  We parked off the road, in the weeds, and followed a dirt track to the employee entrance. A guard with an AK-47 leaned against the wall. He looked bored.

  Owl presented her ID. He scanned it with a handheld device. The other white woman followed after her, with barely a blip in the guard’s attention. He did take more care with Raven and Dane, but clearly, he recognized them. When I offered my own ID, he paused and squinted at the credentials.

  “You’re new,” he said.

  “Yessir,” I replied. “I come here to my cousin Billie looking for work—”

  I shut myself up before I could babble myself into trouble. Dane had paused by the doorway, pretending to adjust the laces for her boots. Beyond that, Owl and Raven hovered. I didn’t know what the three of them might do if the guard objected to my credentials.

  The guard studied me for a long moment. His eyes were pale blue. His brown hair was cropped short and plastered against his skull. He looked young, and I wondered why he wasn’t serving at the front.

  He glanced over my ID a second time, then shrugged. “Go on, then.”