Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman - [PUPI 03]

  Bonnie... He was tired enough that the thought of her was like a mild gut-punch of a different sort, taking him unaware even when he knew that it was coming. He let it roll over him, still walking. Bright eyes and a ready smile, her expression almost fey, with her short curls and pointed chin, a mind that was tough and sharp and moved almost as fast as his own. And her body... She was slender, and slightly built, and under the long-sleeved Ts and pants or long skirts she wore most of the time her muscles were warm and firm. He remembered that from the few times he’d touched her, before the Merge made that too complicated to even consider.

  He wanted her, physically. Not a big deal. He’d wanted women who were off-limits before. Knowing how to look and not touch was part of surviving adolescence. It was more than that. He wanted to listen to her talk, to dig into her mind and see what was there, how she thought and why she reacted. He wanted to – Not own her, it wasn’t that kind of crazy, but a level of possession that made him feel deeply uncomfortable, like someone else was poking at him, trying to dig into his secrets.

  “Enough,” he muttered. “You’ve already got it covered, sorted, and spliced. Worry about the stuff you don’t know about. Like where the hell Ian is, and what he’s up to.”

  Even as he was talking to himself, Ben felt the tingling awareness that someone was watching him. Not the same tingling, poking sensation he’d just shaken off, something external, and less magical than physical. He’d followed enough people to know when someone was watching him – and when that watching went from casual interest to a focused hunt.

  “All right, then,” he said, his lips barely moving out of habit, in case someone was watching him. “Shall we play a game?”

  He picked up the pace a little, not fast enough to lose anyone but moving past the other pedestrians with the air of a man late for something. He went the length of the block, and then stopped, bending down as though to tie the lace of his shoe.

  The sense of someone watching stayed close, but no closer than it had been before. A maintained distance.

  That meant his stalker was human, not fatae. The fatae tended to let him know they were there, to try to make him uneasy with their regard. Only humans hid. Ben felt his mouth draw into an unamused smile. He could test the air, see if his tail was Talent or not, but that risked letting the other know he or she had been spotted, and spoiling the game. There were other ways to tell, though.

  Slowing his steps to a more casual pace, he circled around the block, and headed for the nearest cogeneration building.

  The miniature power generators that had become popular recently didn’t have the same catnip appeal of the big’un power plant, but a cogen attracted the attention of every Talent who walked by the same way a pretty girl caught the eye. If his tail was Talent, he would know the moment they crossed the street; they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

  I spent the rest of the day looking over Sharon’s notes, not so much looking for something as looking for what wasn’t there, a missing element or fact that would open up a new level of questions. All I got was a slight case of eyestrain: Sharon might not have my perfect memory, or Nick’s ability to make intuitive leaps, but she was exactly as methodical as you’d expect for someone originally trained as a paralegal.

  “You checked the rest of the house?”

  “Yes.” Nothing in Nick’s tone let me know what an insulting question that had been, which I appreciated. “The kitchen was spotless, and surprisingly Spartan. I guess he doesn’t entertain much, or have any interest in foood.

  “Upstairs was nicer, but still pretty plain,” he went on, tapping a finger on the table as though the beat would jog his memory. Hell, maybe it did. “I mean, nice but not lush, the way you’d think somebody that rich would do it.”

  My mentor had that kind of money, or maybe even more. His apartment in Boston was... I thought about the casual way he slouched in a nineteenth-century armchair, and how Rupert was allowed to sleep on a hand-knotted Persian rug, and allowed as how maybe my idea of lush was kind of skewed.

  “Cheap-looking, or... ?” If he was skimping on the private rooms, that might mean a lack of ready cash, or some other cause for trouble.

  “No. I mean, not that I’m any judge of it, but no I don’t think so. I’ve seen enough of your stuff to know quality, and this was all good. Just not... ” He was struggling to put what he’d seen into words. I waited.

  “Sparse. Like he only cared about the rooms where he spent time, where people saw him. Everything else had the minimum for living but... ” And I could practically smell Nicky making another one of his leaps, sussing out people in a way I could only wonder at. “He doesn’t care about other people. Not about making them comfortable, or seeing to their needs. It’s all about him.”

  “A narcissist?”

  “No. That’s all about perception and self-interest, right? This is more... he isn’t aware that anyone might have needs or wants, beyond where they connect to him, or that they even exist, when he can’t see them? Like a sociopath.”

  Oh. Oh, that was not what I wanted to hear. At all.

  “So... what does that add to the case?”

  Nick shrugged, which drove me crazy. I hated shrugs; they were so utterly useless as communication because they could mean too many things. Lazy, my mentor used to say, and he was right. “Nothing, really. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Right.” Because why should even simple cases be easy? I went back to my notes, and let Nick do the same with mine.

  And if there was a part of me that was listening for the touch of Venec’s core against mine, I wasn’t going to admit to anything.

  It said a lot about how trained we’d gotten in the past year that when Venec didn’t come back that afternoon and Stosser never made an appearance all day, we still remembered Venec’s Law: Nobody Pulls an All-Nighter without Big Dog Approval. At least, I think we all did – when I left at six, Sharon was still going over her notes, looking at the diorama she and Nick had started putting together. But of all of us, she was the least likely to lose track of time – or to use that as an excuse to disobey standing orders.

  Lou, who had managed not to blow herself up during the spell trials, was putting on her coat when I headed out, and we walked out together, after I made sure the coffeemaker had been turned off for the night.

  I’d headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway when Lou stopped me with a puzzled question. “Why don’t any of you use the elevator?”

  It was a good question. Easy to answer, except for the fact that none of us were willing, or able, to talk about it, even now. Also, if I made Lou paranoid, too, Venec would kick my ass. So I didn’t tell her about the teenage boy who had been killed during an attack on us when we first opened shop, when power shorted out and the elevator plummeted into the basement. I just shrugged, and pushed open the door, giving her a lesser truth. “It keeps us in shape.”

  Truth, but not the entire truth, and it came out as natural as honey. As a painfully self-aware teenager, I used to insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because anything else was a lie. I’d thought black was black, and white, white, and the right answers were obvious to anyone, if you only thought about it.

  I had been an arrogant twit back then, and it’s a wonder J didn’t lock me in a closet until I was thirty.

  With everything else going on, between the two new cases and the underlying worry about where Venec had disappeared to, that thought about lying should have come and gone. Instead it nagged at me. Lou and I went our separate ways on the sidewalk and I – on a whim – decided to walk home rather than taking the subway. It was only a couple of miles, and I felt the need for fresh air, rather than being packed into rush-hour mass transit. I stopped in the local bodega for a bottle of water and a halvah bar to have for dessert, and started walking.

  We had been funded not to hand out judgment but to establish the facts – the where and the who – of a crime, which would lead us to the why and the how. But fa
cts didn’t exist in a vacuum, neatly cut and packaged. We had to shake them out of the messier tangle of human emotions and motivations.

  Black and white. Truth and lies. The ki-rin hadn’t been able to lie, but it had deceived. Aden Stosser, our boss’s sister, lied about us and what we did, and thought that it was the truth. Sharon suspected that our newest client was lying about the break-in but he was so good at it, she couldn’t tell. Sociopath. Maybe.

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Sir Walter Scott, not Shakespeare. Deception and truth and half truths. It was the reason we did this job; so that nobody could hide behind magic and deny their actions or deeds. And if sometimes we allowed those actions to be buried again, for the greater good...

  “It’s not our job.”

  I swear, I thought I’d said it out loud until I realized that Venec was walking alongside me.

  “Motherofgod.” It came out in a hot breath, and I shuddered at how easily he’d managed to come up next to me, without my even noticing. “Also, goddamn it. I thought you said this thing would make us more aware of each other, not less?”

  The one time we’d talked about it. God knows what he’d have discovered by now. I swear, every time I adjusted to this shit, the universe smirked at me.

  “I found you,” Venec pointed out, sounding like he was talking about a particularly boring weather report.

  Yeah. He had. How? I touched my wall, and was surprised at how thick it was. He found me through that? Hell. I thinned it a little, and the heat of his presence came through, like standing next to a sunlamp. We walked the rest of the block in silence, as I tried to adjust it so that I could tell where he was, but not feel like he was quite so damn close.

  Except he was. His arm kept touching the sleeve of my leather jacket, and I would almost swear he was walking close enough that the fabric of my black skirt brushed his thigh more than once, but when I looked down, there was a professional foot-plus between us.

  I thought about asking him where the hell he’d disappeared to, this afternoon, but didn’t.

  “It’s not our job,” he said again, finally. “To save the world. It’s not even our job to tell the world that they’re in danger.”

  I had no idea what the hell he was talking about now. But he wasn’t really talking to me; I knew that even without the Merge. He was working something out in that twisty, very smart brain of his, and I was just the audience. So I just walked, and waited.

  “I was followed this afternoon,” he said finally, not so much getting to the point as putting it aside. “Human, but not Talent. He, I’m pretty sure it was a he, or a very butch woman, followed me for almost an hour, always keeping half a block behind. Didn’t do anything, just watched.”

  I thought about that for a few steps. “You think it was the Bitch, sending someone?”

  I didn’t really think that naming Aden Stosser would summon her... exactly. But I wasn’t going to take the chance. Big Dog’s sister hated us, for reasons only she and Ian and maybe Venec understood, and had tried to shut us down before, first through intimidation and then direct attack.

  Ben sighed at my use of the extremely unaffectionate nickname, but he didn’t bother scolding us any longer. She had earned it. “Maybe. Ian swears the Council is watching her too closely, after the last dustup. Won’t stop her – nothing short of a nuclear blast stops her – but he expects she’ll go through the Council now, try to worm her way into influencing votes, keeping us from being recognized, maybe block anyone from aiding us. And that sort of manipulation is Ian’s territory, not ours. Thank god.” He shook his head, and I felt the overwhelming need to run my hand through those messy curls, push the dark hair away from his face so that I could see him better.

  My fingers stayed locked by my side.

  We were two blocks from my apartment, and I was starting to wonder where this was going. If he asked to come in... what was I going to say?

  The old Bonnie wouldn’t have blinked: a hot guy with good manners, smart and built, and definitely interested? Duh! Only I’d already determined that I wasn’t the old Bonnie.

  And I couldn’t afford to take a tumble with Benjamin Venec. Not because I thought he’d fire me if things went bad. I knew better, now. That wasn’t his style. I wasn’t even worried that it would make working together uncomfortable, at least, not between the two of us. I knew me, and I knew him. It was the rest of the team. For all that they joked, I had a feeling that they would freak if they knew what was really going on, and Stosser...

  Did Ian know? Had Ben told him? My brain couldn’t even go there. Anyway, I wasn’t going to and he wasn’t going to and that had been decided already. And even if they handled it fine, I chose my partners, damn it. I didn’t need some mystical matchmaker shoving me.

  I could hear J sigh, all the way from Boston.

  We walked another block, but he didn’t say anything more.

  “We need to fine-tune the organ-check spell,” I said, moving the conversation back firmly onto work ground, where we both knew what the hell was going on. “I knew that there was water in the lungs, so our DB definitely drowned, but the body’s already been released, which means no way to check what kind of water.” There was an organization that claimed fatae bodies when they ended up in the morgue, and disposed of them either through the breed representative, or on their own. Bad luck for us; this once they weren’t backed up. “Anyway, even if I’d thought of it... salt water from fresh? I’m not sure we can do that, the way the cantrip is structured right now.”

  You had to be very specific when you were working with forensic magic; we’d learned that the hard way. Ask a vague question, and you got run over with too much information. Too much information was worse than none, because you couldn’t figure out what was important. But finding the right balance meant that it was harder to create a one-spell-fits-all cantrip; everything had to be more specialized than we’d thought.

  That was where I excelled; fine-turning the details. But we couldn’t spare me from the field, not with two open jobs.

  Venec nodded, accepting my assessment. “Do you want to work on it, or should I put it in the fishbowl?”

  The fishbowl was exactly that – a glass bowl on a table in the smaller conference room, the windowless one that was best shielded for current-use. If you had an idea, or a problem, you wrote it down and tossed it into the bowl, and whenever someone had spare time and energy, they’d go fishing for a problem to solve.

  “Fishbowl, for now, although I’ll keep poking at it. The body’s already been disposed of, so no way to go back and check.” I’d never asked what the fatae normally did with their dead; I suspected asking would be rude, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, anyway. J always said that sex and burial traditions were where most cultural misunderstandings happened.

  We turned a corner, our steps almost perfectly matching. I wondered if he was aware of that.

  “What’s your working theory?” he asked.

  “On the drowning? It was either a personal grudge – ” the most likely explanation when dealing with the fatae, who tended to have short fuses and long memories “ – or money.” If it wasn’t some personal insult, it was money. The fatae just didn’t get het up about sex the way some humans did – at least far’s I’d ever heard. Money, though, they were just as wound up as any spending species. “Why else do you get dumped in the East River?”

  “Drugs? There was a nice little trade in heroin a while back, nasty pure stuff that would kill a human in one dose.” Venec went thoughtful again. “The craze seems to have faded, but there could be a new joyjuice on the market. You might want to ask Danny.”

  Danny Hendrickson, former NYPD, current P.I., and one of the few human/fatae crossbreeds I knew about. Danny was a good guy, and had helped us out before, so long as it didn’t interfere with his own cases. He was also fun to go drinking with, not that we’d had time to do that, much. I nodded. “I’ll call him when I get home. He keeps weird h
ours, I might be able to reach him, or leave a message.”

  The fatae, being of magic but not using magic, could enjoy the benefits of modern technology like laptop computers, cell phones, and answering machines. I tried not to be too jealous.

  “Do you think we might have a drug war among the fatae? Christ.” The idea kind of creeped me out. Fatae were scary enough on their own; they didn’t need drugs, especially drugs that led to violence, added to the mix.

  Venec went from peer voice to Big Dog voice without blinking. “Don’t rule anything out until we know it’s not a viable theory.”

  I winced. Okay, I deserved that. “Right. Drugs, or drug-trafficking. Danny. I’m on it.”

  And then we were at the stoop of my building, and I paused, my hand reaching out for the railing. The air around us was the dusky thickness that made it almost impossible to read someone’s expression, even if they were right next to you. I could have let down the walls a little more to feel what was going on... but I didn’t.

  There was a hesitation in the air, like the entire damn city was waiting to see what we’d do.

  I wanted him. Every damn cell of my body wanted him, and even knowing that it was one of my worst ideas didn’t dull the ache.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said. “Sleep well.”

  And then he was gone, walking down the street like the UPS guy who’d knocked-and-dropped, and was on to his next delivery.

  A wave of hurt swept through me, so unexpected that I almost called after him to demand an explanation, an apology.

  Instead, I pulled my key from my shoulder bag, and let myself inside.

  The shiver of unease that passed over the city days before had settled, for the moment, at the edge of Central Park. The usual steady noise of evening traffic on the avenue had been overlaid with a snarling mess of human voices and barking dogs. Two of the ubiquitous food carts that lurked along the perimeter had somehow slammed into each other, causing their contents – roasted nuts, for one, and hot pretzels and soda for the other – to spill all over the walkway, and the two owners to stand over the disaster, screaming at each other in two different languages, neither English, clearly insulting each otheer’s patrimony, while the two cops called to the scene tried to get someone to tell them, in English, what had happened.