by Nina D'Aleo
After the fallout from that event, and subsequent death threats from my mother, Dad was much more reserved at my brother’s wedding. But where one ridiculously drunk person abstains another steps up to the plate—or the bar, as it were. The resident drunk at Benicio and Gemma’s wedding had started off being loud and tragically unfunny, went on to engage in rum-breathed flirting with anyone who’d stand still long enough and ended up doing the chicken dance wearing my mother’s bra on his head. (Apparently it’d been so uncomfortable that she had taken it off and left it on a chair in the women’s bathroom—and somehow—this guy had got his hands on it.) You had to laugh … sometimes hysterically.
I nudged my partner and said, “This is nice.”
Dark turned and gave me a look of supreme indifference and unmitigated boredom.
“Romantic,” I added, to tease him.
His expression took a vaguely ill turn.
“Look at the brides.” I gestured to the entrance. “What do think of that dress? Would that suit me?”
Dark stared at me until I said, “What?”
“I hate weddings.” He over-pronounced each word. “And everything to do with weddings.”
“Oh come on,” I said to him, undeterred. “You had fun at Benicio’s wedding.”
He winced and shook his head. “Didn’t we just decide last night that neither of us is getting married?”
“I don’t recall deciding that,” I said. “I remember you telling me I wasn’t marriage material.”
Dark threw up his hands and sighed: Here we go again—the marriage conversation. “Don’t you think of anything else these days?” he asked, pained.
I shrugged. “Not really—no.”
“Okay, listen,” Dark said. “If nothing else puts you off, think of this. I read a study recently about marriage styles or something like that—whatever—basically what it was saying was—no matter what we do most people end up repeating the relationship patterns of their parents.”
“Well we’re screwed,” I said.
“Exactly.” He tapped my arm. “So no weddings—no rings, no flowers, no ‘Does my butt look big in this shade of white?’ Okay?”
“Well maybe not for me,” I said. “But apparently you’ll be saying ‘I do’ before the year is out.”
Dark groaned and toppled over to his side. “Don’t encourage him. He has no idea what he’s talking about. No one’s getting married,”
“Okay,” I agreed. A few seconds later I asked, “But if I was—do you think I’d look good in that dress?”
Dark slid out his sunglasses and pushed them over his eyes. He crossed his arms and clenched his jaws. As far as he was concerned the conversation was over. I laughed quietly to myself. Some days he was so easy to tease.
My smile faded as a bad idea came to me. We’d viewed an image of the walt so we knew who we were looking for, but we didn’t know what she was doing at the park. What if she was a bride? How the hell were we going to vanish a bride on her wedding day? She wasn’t exactly replaceable. I’d turned to Dark to ask the question when I spotted our walt, thankfully not in white. She was wearing a pink velour tracksuit and had a short blonde bob that didn’t quite suit her skin color. She was jogging alone. Perfect. Dark hadn’t shifted his position, but I felt the focus of his attention. We watched the walt jog around the pond. She looked out of breath and uncomfortable, but aside from that I couldn’t see any symptoms of a break-thru. There was a possibility it had spontaneously resolved. I hoped so. I felt sore and tired and I really wanted to stay sitting in the sun for a while longer. The walt stumbled and confusion crossed her face as she noticed her feet felt different, faster, unstable. I sighed—here we go again. She jogged past and Dark and I got up. We started onto separate paths to cut her off near the lookout. I heard a tsk sound and glanced behind me. Two Op Services agents, Hawk and Chewy, were heading our way. Hawk, whose nose was indisputably beakish, raised his eyebrows at me, beckoning.
“Bos,” I called my partner. He turned and headed back. As we moved together toward our colleagues, a call from Headquarters came through on Dark’s radio. He responded and the switchboard operator said, “Dark and Silver, you are reassigned. There have been two walt fatalities—9 Bank Terrace. No surveillance intact.”
“Confirmed,” Dark said.
The connection cut and I said, “No surveillance intact?” There were always multiple cameras hidden in walt houses, for them all to fail was very strange and extremely rare.
Dark shrugged. Rare but not unheard of.
We passed our replacements halfway around the pond. We acknowledged each other with a nod and kept moving. They headed after our target and we moved toward the garden’s exit. I glanced back toward the walt jogging her way up to the lockout. I spotted someone else standing on the hill—a man wearing black. I halted and Dark stopped beside me.
‘What?” he asked.
“I thought I saw that guy at last night’s job,” I said.
A girl who had been heading down from the lockout tapped the guy on the shoulder. He turned and they kissed and hugged.
“Something?” Dark asked, his sharp green eyes studying the couple. He waited for my reply. My intuition had always been stronger than his. Seeing the guy again definitely felt wrong, but I had to admit I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was the same person. It could just be paranoia—an occupational hazard.
The couple walked off with their arms around each other and I shook my head,
“Nah … just … nothing.”
We moved fast to Dark’s car and headed for the inner-city address.
11
By the time we arrived, the refurbished colonial-style house was already swarming with uniforms. Dark and I ducked beneath the yellow tape and headed up a path. No one gave us a second glance. We looked like we had the authority to be there. That was part of our training. It was about the walk, the posture, the facial expression. Humans went a lot more on body language than most people realized. We climbed the steps to the front door, which stood blocked open. First thing I saw was a thick drag line of blood leading from the door back into the house along a polished wood hall. Blood was also drying on the inside door handle. My first thought was someone had tried to escape and been caught. My second thought was that I was glad I hadn’t eaten much for breakfast. We had the training in crime-scene investigation, but it was definitely not my forte.
We edged inside and followed the blood trail to the victims—according to Headquarters they were both walts—one man, one woman, lying facedown. Both had gunshot wounds to their heads. From the similarity of their positioning, it looked like an execution-style murder. But it wasn’t really our job to determine the whos, hows and whys—just to make sure that the killings weren’t related to what they were and to ensure the secrecy of the agency hadn’t been breached in any way. I looked over the murdered walts: they were maybe middle-aged, both well dressed, no obvious abnormalities. I crouched carefully beside the male victim. His arms were splayed, hands sprawled out. I couldn’t see any bruising on his skin or any other signs of a struggle. He did have a distinctive tattoo on his wrist—a black sun split in half with a jagged line. It immediately clicked that I’d just seen this tattoo on Omen, the agent from the elevator. Weird. They taught us not to believe in coincidence, but this couldn’t be anything else: a walt and an agent with similar tats. Maybe it was the symbol of some eighties rock band or something. I checked the woman and saw she had the exact same tattoo on her wrist. My suspicion deepened.
“Do you recognize the tats?” I asked.
Dark studied them for a second then shook his head.
“Do you?”
“Omen from Op Services has the same symbol on his wrist as both the vics.”
Dark’s eyebrows lowered. “The same one?”
I nodded and he said, “We’ll have to look into it.”
We exchanged a look. Agents investigating agents—it didn’t sit well with us but we couldn’t just ignore someth
ing like this.
I took out a notepad and sketched the mark, finishing up as the lead investigator entered behind us and began dishing out orders.
“Better do the intro,” I said.
Dark gave a nod and I got up and approached the officer, while he stayed by the bodies. It was an unspoken arrangement between us that on jobs I generally did the talking. Dark couldn’t help but antagonize and mock people.
“Hi there.” I flashed a federal badge at the police boss. “I hope you don’t mind us having a look around.”
“As long as you don’t mind me asking why the federal interest,” he said.
“Just had some gang-related activity in the area.” I kept it vague. “Do you have a theory on the deaths?”
“Not really: too early,” he said cautiously. “We’ll know more after the autopsies.”
“It doesn’t look like forced entry,” I prompted him.
“No,” he agreed, but gave me nothing else.
“Would you mind if I took your name and called you for further information at a later date?”
“Sure,” he said, “Damon Walsh—Sergeant.”
“Great.” I jotted it down. “We’ll just have a glance around and then we’ll get out of your hair,” I added, which was probably not the best cliché to use, considering he was virtually bald except for a good attempt at a comb-over, but his attentions were already elsewhere. I hadn’t made much of an impression, which was exactly how it was supposed to be. I returned to Dark.
“Guy’s a real chatterbox,” I said. “Couldn’t shut him up.”
My partner smirked.
We did a quick scan of the lounge room, which apart from the dead bodies was neat and tidy, with nothing in particular out of place or noticeably unusual. We headed through the doorway into the kitchen. The smell of baked banana saturated the air. I tapped the oven—still hot—and kneeled down in front of it. There was a cake inside. I called Dark over and he crouched beside me.
“Talk about life cut short,” I said. “One second you’re baking, the next you’re … gone.”
“Do you think anyone would notice if—” Dark started.
“We’re not taking the cake.”
He muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like fun police and stood up. I stayed where I was, feeling more aware than usual of the C11 surveillance cameras I knew were planted all around the house.
I imagined the dead walts alive—cooking, watching something on the TV that sat on the kitchen countertop, or maybe just talking to each other about their days. Everything they did, someone was watching, every private moment—going to the toilet, having a shower, having sex … An invisible witness judged their every step.
“What’s wrong?” Dark peered over the bench at me. I shook my head and tried to hide my anxiety. When I didn’t answer he crouched back close to me. “What, tell me?”
“Are we doing the right thing?” I whispered, as quietly as possible.
“What do you mean?” he whispered back.
“With the walts—watching them, bringing them in.”
“Of course,” he said without a flicker of doubt. “It’s for their own good.”
“Is it?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I’d lost it. “You’ve seen what happens if they’re not re-capped.”
I nodded. He was right. I had seen it—a thousand times.
“Here, have some gum.” He pushed a stick into my hand. “Stop thinking so much.” He stood up, patted me on the head and moved out of the kitchen and through a doorway into the dining room.
I used the counter to drag myself up. Past partially open French doors, the backyard hedges swayed in a slight breeze and brightly colored parrots hopped across the lawn. The sun shone. Life continued, oblivious to the loss. Sounds intruded into my thoughts: footsteps, conversations, the clicking camera of the crime-scene photographer, Dark scraping a chair across the wood floorboards. Then I heard something else—something out of place. I held my breath, and in the silence someone else breathed—behind me, in the pantry. As I turned, the door burst open and a person shoved me hard in the chest, slamming me backward into the edge of the counter. I crashed to the ground and staggered up to see the person leap off the back porch.
“Dark!” I yelled to my partner and took off in pursuit. I barged through the doors and bolted over the railing. My boots slammed down on a concrete path. Dark landed just behind me. We saw the person jumping over the backyard fence.
“Where was he?” Dark called as we sprinted across the lawn.
“Pantry,” I said. We scaled the wood boards of the fence and landed in a back road behind the block of houses. The suspect was already halfway to the other end of the street. He was moving way too quickly. We thundered after him, pushing our bodies to maximum speed. My muscles knotted and lungs burned.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!” Dark yelled at the fleeing stranger. He drew his gun.
As the guy reached the end of the street, a car screeched across his path. Two men, dressed in black, stepped out of the vehicle. Dark took aim. The suspect skidded to a stop and looked back at us. I caught the sense that he was crying. One of the men from the car lifted a hand.
An incredible force rushed toward us with a tidal wave of destruction. It snapped fenceposts like toothpicks and ripped up the concrete. It struck us, sending us both flying backward. I smashed down on the ground and rolled over and over, coming to rest against an uprooted tree trunk. I lay there stunned, with my face pressed to the ground, the smell of soil close to my nose. I blinked to focus and finally rolled over to sit up. I squinted through the settling dust. The suspect was gone. The men and the car were gone. The street was demolished and Dark … I scanned the wreckage and couldn’t see him. I struggled to my feet and still saw no sign. Panic seeped through the shock and spread quickly through my body. Where was my partner? Halfway down the demolished road I spotted a bloodied hand protruding from beneath a slab of rock. I ran.
12
I wandered directionless through the hallways of the hospital, peering through doorways at strangers. The foreboding feeling, the labyrinth of winding corridors and, more than anything, that smell, disinfectant washed over sickness, reminded me of when Dark’s grandfather had died. Visiting his bedside had been like visiting his gravesite—he just wasn’t there any more. Dark had never really dealt with the grief. He just kept burying it and re-burying each time it clawed its way up—zombie pain. My partner had no idea how to deal with emotions. He usually just punched his way through.
Since the emergency crew had brought us in, I’d been stitched and patched and had given my statement to a pair of agents from Support to Operations Division. They’d asked me if I had seen whether our attacker had thrown or propelled an explosive device, or if he’d been holding a detonator. I’d said I hadn’t seen, and, in fact, I hadn’t heard an impact explosion either, prior to the rush of damage. Which to me seemed strange, but everything had happened so quickly. Maybe I’d just blanked it out. Maybe I was concussed. The doctors had said I needed to sit down and rest, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay still, so I limped on. I had a banged-up knee, some cuts and bruises—one on my forehead that looked worse than it was. The body armor must have saved me from any major damage. It shouldn’t have, especially since I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, but somehow it had.
My cell buzzed for the zillionth time. Jovic and Feng, Gloria, Byter and the others from our closer circle of friends had been calling, and so had a whole host of more distant people from the C11 world, but I hadn’t answered at all. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to know if my partner was alive. It felt like every clock in the place was ticking backward second by ever-slowing second. Finally, finally, I heard my name called over the hospital intercom. I ran to the elevator and slammed the button until the doors opened, then ran through the ward hallways until I arrived at Intensive Care, where they’d told me to come when they called.
The nurse at the front de
sk directed me down the hall and I arrived at Dark’s room out of breath.
I went through the open doorway and saw my partner lying on a gurney bed. He was chalky white, battered and bruised and breathing through a machine. I started to cry and couldn’t stop. I went to his side and took his hand. He felt so cold. I didn’t even notice there were other people in the room until the surgeon started talking. He was still wearing his operating cap and gown. A C11 Conference official stood beside him taking notes. The surgeon explained the extent of Dark’s injuries—broken ribs and arm, dislocated shoulder, collapsed lungs, internal bleeds, skull fracture—the list continued. He talked about prognosis—that he expected with extended physiotherapy and occupational therapy Dark would make a reasonable recovery with some long-term reduced capacity. He was lucky, he said, very lucky. I thanked him and he left. The Conference guy loitered for several more minutes, he said a few well-meaning words that sounded rehearsed and patronizing, then he was gone as well and Dark and I were alone.
“Bos?” I whispered to him. I leaned in close. “Boston?”
If I lost him … If I lost him … I couldn’t even think of it. I dragged a chair close and sat. I leaned my head against the bed beside his arm and let time slide. I was vaguely aware of people coming and going, checking machines and charts. Somewhere in the depth of the waking nightmare, I felt Dark’s hand close over mine. I jolted upright and found him watching me through slitted eyes.
“How long have I been out?” he whispered, his voice raspy.
I blinked and checked my watch—just after seven am.
“Almost twenty-two hours,” I said. “It’s Sunday morning.”
He scrunched his eyes shut.
“Are you in pain?” I asked. “I’ll get someone.” I jumped up and the room spun around me.
Dark grasped at my arm again and tried to drag me back down. “I don’t want drugs,” he said. “I want to get clear.”
