The Fox, the Dog, and the King

by Matt Doyle

  I shake my head and sigh. “I heard Castleford gets pretty busy. There’s no way he’d get that much work if he’s this lax with security.”

  “Busy or not, most accountants do a better job of keeping their shit safe than this.” She flicks the screen back into standby and folds it down over the keyboard. “I figured it would be pretty unlikely he’d turn up unless he was a complete idiot. This is too stupid to be as straightforward as it’s obviously meant to look, which means that he at least thinks he’s being clever. Either that or I’m completely misjudging this. I say we gather what we can and get it back to the station. If it’s real, we’ll go after Fuerza. If it’s not, we’ll get our evidence and ramp it up on Castleford.”

  “Sounds good to me. You guys gonna need some help with it all?”

  Hanson shrugs. “Couldn’t tell ya. Dev’ll probably say yes with the dog papers, but how much we can keep you in the loop with the deep stuff is up in the air. As far as the higher-ups are gonna be concerned, bar the statements we’ll need about what happened before we got there, your official involvement ended the moment you got the dog back to its owner. I only suggested you coming along on this because I figured you’d want to. Well, that and because I could. There’s a big difference between assisting with a retrieval and actually digging through the stuff. Unless you have a direct involvement with things going forward for reasons beyond our control, of course, like with the Redwood case. Either way, the first thing we need to do is dump the idiot’s tablet with the tech guys so they can work their magic and get us some stuff to actually work with.”

  I nod because I expected that. I’m still certain that Castleford is the one behind it, mostly because both Fuerza and Sunglasses didn’t set off enough of a warning signal for me to not believe them. Still, I’ll take what I can get. “Dev, huh? You mean Corporal Devereaux, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Since when did you start calling him Dev?”

  “Since I found out it pisses him off.”

  IT’S NEARING MIDNIGHT by the time I get home, and I can’t say it’s been a fun evening.

  Déjà vu is defined as the feeling of already having experienced the present situation. For some, it forms part of the argument that precognition and psychic abilities exist. For others, it’s a simple phenomenon that can be explained away as a brain glitch whereby our internal storage system stutters and accidentally files the recognition of the event happening in front of you in the little drawer marked as past events . For me, déjà vu is part of living in New Hopeland.

  If you stay here long enough, you start to see swathes of similar people doing similar things. When you’re in my line of work, that means common case types are usually accompanied by the feeling that I can accurately predict things like motives and behavioural patterns. In a way, it stops being déjà vu and becomes PI’s intuition. It’s also pretty dangerous because, while many criminals do follow the same well-worn paths with far less variance than they think they’re applying, there will always be someone who’ll surprise you. Get yourself into too much of a comfortable pattern and you’ll either miss something important or fall into some sort of stupid trap. I learned that from my Dad, way back when I was starting out back in Vancouver. He was worried I was treading the same ground too much and that I’d build up habits I wouldn’t be able to shake. Given that he was responsible for passing most of my early cases to me, it was kinda his fault, at least in part. But hey, my Dad was a good man and a good cop, so I was happy for the advice.

  Tonight, I’m bored with déjà vu. Step one, interrupting the actual dogfight. After that came repeating the event in detail to a PD interviewer with a video camera that was so new and fancy he forgot to introduce himself and settled straight into fawning all over the little box of plastic and video memories. Next, I made my way back to Kitsune to go through things all over again, albeit in less detail. They were actually closer to home for me and should have been my last stop, but I could feel myself getting tetchy already and I didn’t want to let that loose on an innocent client. So, Charlie got the brunt of my mood instead. It wasn’t really fair on her, but it’s not like she wasn’t in a foul mood either. By the time I left, two things had smoothed it all over. From Charlie, her normal mug of perfectly made coffee was enough to calm me. At my end, I made a promise to make sure that Castleford was dealt with.

  Déjà vu, eh? After living through the whole mess four times, déjà vu can kiss my ass.

  Bert seems happy to be home too. He came with me to the station so that I could transfer what little recording he’d done to their databases. He seemed okay with the first few people who came to see him, but the longer we stayed, the more attention he was getting, and in the end, I think the constant prodding got to him. Usually, I can classify most of his synthesised cries of caw as serious, cheeky, bored or protective. Today was the first time I’ve heard one that sounded exasperated. In the end, I let him come into the interview room to perch on my shoulder. He stayed outside on top of the tour bus back at the theatre but came in to pace the hallway at Charlie’s.

  I pat his head and say, “The life of a celebrity, eh?”

  “Caw.”

  I consider sending a quick message to Lori to let her know that Fish and Kitsune have been reunited, but quickly decide against it. It’s far too late now, and I don’t want to risk waking her up. Plus, I deserve a break before I talk through it all again. With nothing else to do, I brush my teeth and get ready for bed, letting the home system know that I don’t want my alarm hitting before nine tomorrow. Or today now. I collapse onto the bed and spread myself out over the top of the covers. It’s a hot night, and the last thing I want is to be stuck with such an uncomfortable temperature that I can’t sleep. Just as that thought hits me, my eyes drift shut. I sigh and let the darkness swallow the gentle clack-clack of a gargoyle on patrol.

  MORE OFTEN THAN not, I’m aware when I’m dreaming. It’s the logical part of my brain that does it. There are no monsters other than those you share the city with . That’s the most common thing it whispers in my ear during dream time. These are memories is another. Tonight, it’s saying three words: Isn’t it obvious ?

  Turning on the spot, I can see that I’m in an old-style newspaper printing office. And by old style, I mean really old style. There’s even a small selection of movable type presses. These things are the original Gutenbergs, where staff had to manually use the press rather than rely on steam engines like the later models. I also notice I’m not only wearing the same clothes I’ve spent the entirety of my less-than-excellent adventure in dogfighting in, but I also appear to be sporting the black and white shading of 1940s cinema.

  “You can tell when you’ve spent too long without a break when your brain decides to go film noir on you,” I grumble to myself. It does at least mean that my brain is right, though.

  Yes, it’s obvious that I’m dreaming. The last thing I remember is lying in bed in an old T-shirt and a loose pair of jogging bottoms while Bert sang his claw-on-wood lullaby. While New Hopeland is home to some very strange individuals, I don’t think I’ve ever met one who would sneak into my office, evade Bert, dress me in my work clothes, and then take me to a place that doesn’t exist. Newspaper offices in New Hopeland are all small single floors in multi-business buildings and feature nothing but the newest affordable tech. Plus, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Gutenberg anywhere in Utah these days, with even the museums favouring full immersion prehistoric simulations to old lumps of wood and metal. Full marks to you on the smell, though, Miss Brain. It stinks worse than the time Terry Crawford sprayed ink up my nose in tenth-grade Biology.

  I smile at the memory of trying to jam his leaky fountain pen up his nose in retaliation. Was it worth the detention? Yes, it was.

  I walk up to the nearest press and try to read the prearranged letter blocks, but they’re all blank. Must be a slow news night.

  Thud .

  I turn to the third of the printing presses just in time to see th
e large wooden board at the back slide noisily under the press block. The crank at the top creaks around, pushing the weighted section down, then clatters back again and the board slides back out. The board on the press next to me snaps shut on a sheet of paper I’m sure wasn’t there a second ago and slams down onto the printing block, then starts to slide under the press. I take a step back and notice that not only has the other press started the same sequence, but the third press is now repeating the same movements at an unnatural speed, spreading printed paper into the air with each cycle.

  I back myself up against the door to the room and give the knob a quick jiggle. Not unexpectedly, it’s locked. “Night of the Haunted Printing Press.” I groan and step forward into the swirling storm of freshly printed paper. I snatch a couple of pieces out of the air and skim through the matching headlines and articles. The stories all come with two identical and poorly rendered photographs interspersed with the text, which seems ridiculous because I’m pretty sure that the early Gutenbergs were used for text only. Nothing like your brain taking artistic licence to make a point, eh?

  The article in question is something that I have a vague recollection of. The PD got a call from someone whose name I can’t remember stating that they’d found a body in the middle of the street. Investigations showed that the CCTV for the area had mysteriously shut down for half an hour, and when they returned, the body was suddenly present. The dead man was Johnny something. I know that because the word Johnny is clear on the paper, but the surname is, much like the mystery caller’s name, smeared and smudged out. It’s nice to know my memory is as infallible as ever .

  The first photo shows a small number of nameless cops working at the scene, but that’s clearly not what my brain is trying to get me to realise. The second photo is the important one because, while a little blurred, it clearly shows that the caller was a younger Sunglasses Paloma. I scratch my head and try to remember the case. It was before I moved here, I think, but not so long before that, it wasn’t still buzzing around the sites on a regular basis. That’s right… Johnny was supposed to have done something to upset the Kings. I remember because that was the first time I’d heard about them.

  The mystery caller disappeared shortly after the case was closed as some sort of accidental death, and the conspiracy nuts all decided he must have been one the King’s hitmen or something like that, and he’d just gotten careless and been taken care of. If he fell out with the Kings but didn’t find himself six feet under, he must have built up a lot of goodwill with them. Which means a lot of good work. Yeah, I was right to be wary around him.

  The printing presses stop abruptly, and for a moment the only sound is the gentle rustle of the last few identical sheets fluttering down to the ground. Once they’ve all fallen, I hear a loud click behind me and turn to see the door behind me open into darkness. I shrug, chuck the papers in my hand onto the pile that’s amassed in front of me, and walk through the door.

  I DON’T KNOW if it was instantaneous, or if I just didn’t have any more dreams, but the next thing I remember is the gentle sound of my alarm bleeping unobtrusively through the room speakers. “Alarm off,” I grumble, and stretch my arms behind my head, soaking up the comfortable feel of my tense muscles relaxing.

  I raise one hand to my face and rub the sleep out of eyes. “Sunglasses worked for the Kings, eh? That’s a big fall. Maybe he’s planning to use Fuerza to instigate some sort of revenge plot? Either that or his death was a ruse and the Kings want something out of Fuerza. Ugh. Conspiracy Tam at your service. Stupid brain.”

  A yawn signals the start of my normal routine, but I only get as far as beginning the dressing step before my phone rings. Since meeting Lori, or to be more accurate, since Lori decided that my embarrassment at how I was dressed when I first met her was a good source of fun, I’ve become a little more careful about making sure I get dressed. It’s not that I don’t still feel calling at a ridiculous time is justification for having to deal with me as you find me, it’s more that I kind of feel like I should be saving my natural-if-slightly-slovenly form for Lori. Well, barring accidents anyway. I can’t guarantee I’m going to be getting any morning visitors today, but with the number of threads left hanging from the Castleford mess, I can’t entirely rule it out. If I thought it was more likely than not that I’d have a company-free morning, then I’d sit down on the bed and answer the phone in my underwear, safe in the knowledge that it’s not my fault if someone decides to come knocking entirely unexpected. As it is, there’s too great a possibility of unannounced visitors, so I say out loud, “Synch room speakers with telecommunication device one, and begin call transmission. Integrate room tracking, target, Cassandra Tam.”

  “Synch complete,” the system replies. “Transferring call.”

  After a moment, the ringing cuts off and a short beep plays through the room speakers, letting me know I can start chatting. “Cassie Tam,” I say, and start to work on untangling the legs on the pair of trousers that I carefully screwed up into a ball and chucked into my closet after the last laundry run.

  “Miss Tam,” a familiar voice replies. “I trust you are well?”

  Dream of the Devil . “Well enough.”

  “We understand there were some complications with Mr. Castleford’s arrest,” Sunglasses Paloma replies. His voice is eerily calm, making what he’s said a simple statement of fact rather than an attempt at confirmation.

  “You could say that. You know I can’t tell you too much, though, eh?”

  “Of course. If we understand the situation on a base level, however, we may be able to offer some assistance.”

  I sigh and slip my legs into the trousers. “The dogfight was just starting when I got there. I made sure it didn’t go ahead, but Castleford got away before the cops arrived. Is Fuerza there with you?”

  “I am afraid not.”

  “Okay, well, would he be willing to speak to the police about what’s been happening?”

  “We would rather avoid that, unless absolutely necessary, Miss Tam. Mr. Fuerza and the New Hopeland Law Enforcement Agencies do not see eye to eye.”

  “Don’t see eye to eye? That’s an understatement. Look, I went to Castleford’s apartment with one of the officers that was part of the raid. He wasn’t there, but his laptop was.”

  “I see. And would I be correct in assuming that he had set this up in order to place the blame for the dogfight on Mr. Fuerza?”

  There’s no point in showing your cards just yet, Cassie. Especially when you’re not far from an empty hand here. “I couldn’t tell you. But until the PD tech guys get through with it, I doubt they’ll make a move on Castleford. Should I expect them to find anything implicating your boss?”

  “I suspect you already know the answer to this, Miss Tam. However, in the spirit of playing along, neither you nor the police will find anything legitimate. Whether that fact can be proven will be key to the smooth conclusion of this debacle.”

  “I don’t like the way you said smooth.”

  “And we do not like the possibility that there will be any other form of conclusion. Needless to say, we are prepared for any eventuality.”

  I finish buttoning my shirt but put off rummaging for a tie. “What happens if the PD find out something about this secret of Fuerza’s? It sounds like you’re preparing for war here.”

  “It is not our belief that they will. The nature of the information Mr. Castleford obtained is such that revealing it in this way would do nothing to further his probable goal. In that respect, we expect him not to have stored anything on the systems at his known residential locations. It is more likely that he has a further storage point, but we cannot be certain of this. Regardless, the publication of the aforementioned information would be nothing more than a desperation move on his part.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what he found either, are you?”

  “No. Even if I thought it was going to be useful to you, you would be better off not knowing. Frankly, everyone wo
uld.”

  “Diu . If you’re not going to tell me anything, then why bother…? Wait. You’re worried that he is desperate, aren’t you? Or that he will be soon.”

  “Children sometimes argue over the perceived ownership of toys. In some cases, when asked to share, a greedy child will break the toy rather than have to give up part of their time with it.”

  “If I can’t have it, you can’t have it either.”

  “Precisely. Mr. Castleford is ambitious, and his desires match this trait. If desperate enough, we cannot rule out that this will become his mentality.”

  “You don’t strike me as the sort who would avoid killing. I hate to say it, but why not just take him down? That’s the way this place normally works.”

  “I do not kill indiscriminately, Miss Tam. In addition, ambition is a useful trait for employees to have. If you are already at the top of an organisation, you seek to find the best ways to motivate your staff. Ambition is something that is easily manipulated. Despite this slip-up on Mr. Castleford’s part, his overriding desires combined with his skills mean that he remains useful to Mr. Fuerza. Providing he can be reined in, of course. His legal capture may serve to remind him of his place.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Sunglasses remains silent, giving me the answer I expected. Execution isn’t uncommon in the New Hopeland Underground. “You said you may be able to be of assistance. How?”

  “There are those among his list of victims who wish to make amends for their actions. Then, there are others who find his actions deplorable. While I am confident that any searches of Mr. Castleford’s personal possessions will reveal nothing more than easily debunked evidence implicating Mr. Fuerza, it is imperative that his arrest occurs before he can reach a point where he reverts to childlike actions. We are offering to assist in locating Mr. Castleford and herding him to you.”

  I narrow my eyes and ask, “Why me? If you believe his evidence can be so readily debunked, then why not send him to the police?”