Fiddleback Trilogy 1 - A Gathering Evil

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  "One last question: How are you and Coyote connected?"

  Bat stood and tucked a T-shirt into his jeans. "I used to fight on the professional circuit. A promoter kidnapped a friend to get me to throw a fight. Coyote freed the hostage, and the promoter died when my opponent flew from the ring and crushed him in his seat."

  Natch, perched on the end of the bench, drew her legs up and hugged them to her chest. "After that fight, a Lorica janitor thanked Bat for winning. He'd bet a lot of money on him—money he needed for his wife's medical treatments. She ended up dying anyway, but in a gang drive-by shooting, not from her disease."

  I folded my arms across my chest. "That janitor was Phil Costapain, which is why you're coming with us. Costapain trusts you?"

  Bat gave me a single nod as he closed his locker. He didn't lock it, but just looking at him told me why he didn't have to. He held out his right arm, Natch grabbed hold, and he lifted her to her feet in one smooth motion. They both smiled at each other, then headed off into The Trench.

  I followed, but until we got to the street, I don't think they noticed.

  Phil Costapain had managed to choose a hiding place that would have kept him safe from the best trackers in the world. Aside from being thought dead, he had the advantage of living in an area where two mobile home parks had mated and metastasized to all the neighboring areas, including what had once been the Greenwood Memorial Cemetery Park. Interstate 10 thundered through the middle of the community and, just beyond it, twisted through the interchange known as the Stack, but had no real effect on Boxton.

  Getting there proved less difficult than I imagined when I learned neither Natch or Bat had a car. We hopped a gypsy bus that angled us across the west side of Phoenix as it dropped folks off and stopped for other riders flagging it down. Big and painted with colors that glowed in the gloom of Eclipse, it lumbered through the grimy streets like a beetle with elephantitis.

  The three of us took up a position behind the driver. As Bat boarded, he paid his fare, then stood and stared down at some drugged-out wastrel sprawled across a bench. The guy looked up and saw that his current trip had just veered into the land of bad vibes. Bat waited for him to clear out, then he let Natch and an old black woman sit down.

  The guys toward the back looked nasty enough for me to think we might have gotten on a Department of Corrections bus by mistake. Bat grabbed the overhead rail and glared at our fellow riders, which inspired most of them to get off or hang loose in the very rear of our transport. I ended up standing right behind the driver, trying to give the old woman sitting in Bat's shadow a reassuring smile.

  The bus' dim headlights hid more than they revealed, but they gave me a strong impression of the nightmare that made up chunks of Eclipse. Buildings that had once been useful now lay in total disrepair. Whole blocks looked like they had been abandoned and had trash barricades surrounding them. Oddly enough, the barricades looked as if they had been put up to keep things in that section instead of out. Even more strange was the lack of children playing on or around those barricades.

  Because the streetlights in this area of town had been pulled down, shot out or rewired to provide power for squatters living near them, small bonfires had been lit to illuminate the area. The lunacy of starting fires on hot desert days was further compounded by the clouds of oily smoke that hung low, trapped beneath the Eclipse panels. Some of the squatters' nests built on the underside of the panels looked like soot-smudged tumors hanging in place. They could not have been habitable in any serious sense of the word, yet blank faces looked down at us from above regardless.

  A passenger jostled me when he came aboard, and I felt my billfold disappear from my back pocket. Before he squeezed past Bat, I drew the Krait and poked him in the back of the head with it. "As long as you have my wallet, you might as well take this, too. You want it in pieces?"

  The man swallowed hard, then turned and offered me a picket-fence smile. "Sorry, I'm trying to reform. Really." He held my wallet up, and I took it from him.

  He tried to make his way by Bat, but Bat stopped him and grabbed his right hand. He held it up and spread the fingers out by pressing it against his left hand. "You gotta pay the toll."

  "Toll?"

  "Toll?" Bat's face lost all emotion and his eyes darkened. "Which is your favorite finger?"

  "W-what?"

  "Wrong answer." Bat's muscles bunched in his shoulder and arm as he jerked the man into the air by his wrist. He smashed the man's hand into the bus's roof, and the fingers broke like dry spaghetti. "There, now you're reformed."

  The man screamed, but the mere threat of a cuff silenced him. He clutched his broken hand to his chest and stumbled back, being jostled from seat to seat by the bus's motion and the angry riders he leaned against. Finally, in the back, he met a gang who forced him to "high-five" them with his broken hand before they put him into a seat.

  "Thanks, I think."

  Bat nodded. "Quick. Good."

  I sensed some respect in his voice for how smoothly and swiftly I'd reacted, and that pleased me. Still, I found it disquieting that I felt good about respect from a man who had so casually broken the hand of a man who had done nothing to him. Yet, even as I examined that circumstance, I recalled his religious bent and realized he had only inflicted on the man a punishment for his sin of theft. Within his world, he was being amazingly consistent, and I imagined he would even confess to what he had done here, adding to his burden so he could be absolved of it.

  The bus stopped a block from the edge of our destination. Natch preceded me off the bus and crossed the street to where a group of four youths loitered on the corner watching little kids play kick-ball. The youths all wore jackets that had a black disk sewn on the back, and the words "The Plattermen" embroidered beneath it. When they saw her they started preening and moving like lazy snakes. They eyed me suspiciously, trying to figure if I was undercover for Scorpion Security or a mark to be taken. Bat stepped from the bus, and they sharpened up considerably.

  Natch went through an elaborate ritual of knocking fists, slapping hands and pointing with one of the youths, then invited me over. "Caine-man, this is Zinger. He was maxin' in Florence, then he beat the bricks and crawled back under the Nixrock."

  Zinger, a long, lean and languorous black youth kept his hands in the pockets of his bluejacket. "Caine. Is that like in candy cane?"

  I shrugged. "I'm not bent, and it'll take more than you to lick me, so I'd say not. It's Caine."

  "Like the killer," Bat added quietly.

  Zinger looked me up and down, then dismissed me with a sneer. "What chu want, Natch?"

  "Paying our respects to the dead."

  The youth thought for a second, then nodded slowly. He turned to a confederate wearing a red bandana over his head. "Buc will take you."

  "Gratz."

  Zinger grabbed Natch's shoulder. "If anything happens . . ."

  Like a striking snake, Bat snagged Zinger's wrist and squeezed until the hand opened like a flower. Natch turned and stroked Bat's free arm. "It's okay, Bat, no harm done."

  "Not yet." Bat smiled in a most horrifying way, displaying strong, sharp white teeth. "You were in a crack, Zinger." He released his hand. "She got you out."

  The street boss pulled his hand back but refused to show it had hurt at all. "Girl, you gotta get that man some lithium or sumthin'. He needs to chill. Buc, go."

  Buc, smaller and stockier than Zinger, walked all loose and open like he'd been put together with rubber bands instead of muscles. He didn't say anything and sauntered along as if he wasn't connected to us in any way. Other folks on the street called out to him, and he winked or hissed or hooted at them, but never said anything I could decipher as words.

  Boxton lived up to its name. Mobile homes and more conventional buildings were stacked up in crenelated clusters that brushed the underside of Frozen Shade at its highest points. Rubbish-choked alleys ran between the trailers, turning Boxton into a rat's warren of twisting trails an
d dead ends. In the places where the pathways were wide enough for, say, a Scorpion Security vehicle to pass between buildings, the paths themselves doubled back constantly. It took no genius to see the vehicle would be slowed to a crawl and left very vulnerable to anti-vehicle rockets or automatic-weapons fire.

  Buc led us into one trailer at the bottom of a pyramid. We entered without knocking and Buc never even acknowledged the family huddled toward the rear of the building. I only saw them in the light of a boxy television, and the slack-jawed look of stupefaction on their faces led me to believe they never saw any of us. Grandfather, sitting in an easy chair and sucking on a beer, scratched his belly through the thin material of a stained T-shirt. Mom and her eldest daughter both dandled children on their knees, while two other young kids sat on the floor and close enough to the set that I could only see their eyes.

  Looking at the reality of the trailer, it did not surprise me that the only spark of 1ife I saw in their eyes came from the TV's reflection. Both stove burners had pots encrusted with what might have been rice and beans, but they'd been there for days and the beans looked like a rat had fed itself at some point. Pizza crusts and grease-stained boxes littered the little table that folded down from the wall. The faucet bled rusty water into the sink, and it coagulated into an orange stain on a plastic plate.

  The place stunk of too many people and too much beer. The sour scent of stale beer managed to cut through the thick, musty odor of human habitation, but near the sink it lost to the sharp smell of whatever was growing beneath the unclean dishes. Mildew fur ringed the base of the leaking faucet and had spread to the plastic splashboard.

  We passed through the patio doorway into a trash midden at the center of the pyramid. Buc scrambled up an aluminum ladder and entered through a hole in the bottom of another trailer. Natch followed him and Bat brought up the rear. If not for the additional clue of thick smoke and the exchange of a grandmother for a grandfather, I would have sworn we'd returned to the trailer down below.

  Our trek took us through four more trailers; the only cause for hope was that the deeper we went, the degree of decay lessened. I realized, of course, that residents who lived closer to the core of Boxton had gotten there by virtue of either longevity or strength, hence their accommodations had changed hands less often.

  The core residents evidenced more life, but only in the fact that they greeted Buc or seemed to recognize Bat. They were neither cordial or hostile to me—they just treated me like I did not exist. Their homes looked a bit less worn down than the fringe ones we'd visited, but even they were leaky, stinky man-nests. Had hamsters somehow evolved to human size, they would have been comfortable in these places—and in most they would have found a layer of newspaper already laid down.

  Buc led us through a tunnel that ran beneath the freeway, then down a narrow pathway that took us through a hole in the fence around the Greenwood Cemetery. There, deep in the heart of Boxton, the trailers had only been stacked two-high and looked in very good condition. Here, behind the walls of their own transient citadel, the leaders of Boxton had it very good. They drew running water from what used to be the cemetery's sprinkler system, and it looked like they pulled power by tapping the overhead cells directly.

  The gang member did not lead us to one of the trailer mansions, but directed us to where a mausoleum had been built into the side of a manufactured hillock. The name above the door read "Freeman." "Inside, cats, you'll find what you want."

  In through the dark doorway and down two steps we found a small room with a canvas cot arranged in a corner. A small candle burned on the bottom of an overturned coffee can. Seated beside it, with a pillow under his rump, an old man leaned against the cold, concrete wall. In his gnarled hands he held a paperback book with the cover torn off. Outside we could hear the roar of cars and trucks speeding along the highway.

  He tucked his half-glasses back up on his white-haired head and blinked at us. "Who are you?" He put a postcard in the book to mark his place, then set it down.

  Natch knelt on the other side of him, putting her back against the cot. Bat tucked himself back into the corner beside the door, and I remained in the shadows near the foot of the cot. Natch gave him her sweetest smile, which bought us some time, and answered him. "We are here to ask you about Nero Loring."

  Costapain shook his head slowly. "I don't know nuffin' 'bout no Mister Lorin'."

  I dropped down to my haunches to put my head on the same level as his, and he drew his legs up reflexively. "I know you have no reason to believe us, but we know you knew Loring. You were his first employee, and he attended your retirement dinner." I jerked a thumb at Bat. "You know Mr. Kabat, and you know he would not have come if we were going to harm you. Please, this is important."

  His voice lost the mushmouth slurrings of an uneducated man. "Son, I don't know shit about you. Bat's just a pit Fighter, and I've seen him work. He doesn't care squat about what happens to me. Natch I've seen around, but she's not from Boxton. You, you look like a Lorica corporator to me. Now unless you want to convince me of something, I've got reading to do."

  I nodded and rested my forearms on my knees. "Straight out—I haven't got a clue why, but two bottom-feeders being paid by Nerys Loring tried to off me. I think finding her father and keeping him alive will annoy her, and I'd like to do that. I'd like to do that a lot."

  "You won't find him. No one will." He smiled wryly, and his face got a far-away look as if he was remembering one of the vacation trips he took with Loring. "I don't even know where Nero is." As he spoke, I saw an unholy red glint play in his left eye.

  "Buc," I shouted, "come here, now!"

  "Wha chu wa . . . aarrgh!"

  Buc eclipsed the red targeting laser I'd seen reflected in Costapain's eye. As if blasted into the room by the rifle report and not the bullet that preceded it, the youth flew down the stairs and flopped to the floor. His jacket had a small hole midway down the back on his left side, but already a black puddle leaked from beneath him.

  Costapain reached out and bodily lifted Natch up. He deposited her on the cot, then got out of line with the doorway himself. As he moved to where I had been crouched, I scrambled up the steps to the outside, then rolled to my right. As I got to my feet again, I leaped back and to the right, then filled my hand with the Krait.

  Up on the highway overpass I saw a bleached-blond, bare-chested young man lift his rifle and start trotting toward the Volkswagen Kartoffeln van. I ran up the little hill as people streamed out of their houses. I gave the knob below the Krait's rear sight two twists, then dropped to one knee and snapped the safety down. From the top of the hill I aligned the sights with the sniper as he shoved the rifle through the van's sliding door.

  I stroked the trigger twice. I saw the sniper pitch forward, but at that range I couldn't have been certain if it was because the bullets whizzed over his shoulders or passed between them. I triggered off two more shots, smashing the passenger-side mirror and punching a hole in the door, but the van smoked its tires and slam-merged into a stream of horn-honking traffic.

  At the base of the hill Bat eyed the distance from me to the car. He nodded once, then chuckled lightly. Natch and Costapain came up beside him, and the old man had blood on his hands, shirt and tan pants. "Those sons of bitches tried to kill me."

  I looked down at him. "Did they?" I pointed with the gun at the clear kill-zone from the highway to the front of the mausoleum. "I think it was the Aryan Warriors going for a target of opportunity. They saw Buc outside and decided to pop him. I was lucky I saw the laser light. If Buc had moved faster, he could have gotten to cover."

  Costapain wiped his hands on his pants. "Could be what you said."

  "Could be. Now, tell me, why would anyone want you dead?" I slid the Krait back home in the shoulder holster. "You said you didn't know where Nero Loring was."

  The old man's shoulders slumped, and he suddenly looked his age. "Natch, go get me my book. I have a postcard that shows the place we used to
go fishing. It isn't signed or anything, but I know it's from Nero. He's alive and well."

  "Do you think he's there?"

  Costapain shook his head. "That place was an open secret. If his daughter wanted him dead, she'd have him. No, he's not there." He took the book from Natch and flipped it open to the postcard. "It is postmarked 'Sedona.' Lots of retirement stuff up there. Pretty country. Best I can do is tell you he might be there."

  "Thank you." I walked back down the hill. "I think you should come with us and talk to Hal Garrett about finding another place to stay. The Plattermen are not protecting you."

  "What?" He pointed to the overpass. "If I go back out of Boxton, I'll be killed."

  "If you stay here you'll die. Ask yourself this: If they meant to keep you alive, why are you in a place where a straight shot from the interstate can kill you? They've got you on ice, but accessible." I looked over at Buc's body. "Likely they were waiting until Nerys Loring got agitated enough to offer a good price for you."