Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman - [PUPI 03]

  “Yes, yes. I remember you. I caught scent of you when I came in... . Not larger, but trickier. Sometimes a small trick is the best. Let’s do that then, yes,” it said in satisfaction. “But first, to find out where your prickly, pokey, pullable spots are... ” It grabbed at the air in front of it, like opening a cupboard door, and was pulled through a hole that didn’t exist, and out of sight.

  Left behind, the broken loudspeaker continued to squawk instructions and directions nobody could understand, befuddling the passengers of the next train that pulled in and out of the station exactly on schedule, as though nothing had ever been wrong.

  * * *

  six

  As per the Big Dogs’ rules, we were supposed to take off at least one day every six, and if it wasn’t a matter of life or death, two days in a row were preferred. It’s not a suggestion, either: they know that we’re all a little... compulsive, mainly because they trained us to be that way. So when Friday night rolled around, we were kicked out of the office and told not to show our faces again until Monday morning.

  Or, as Stosser put it “go pretend to have a life.”

  Obediently, I spent the weekend doing things that had nothing to do with the job. Or tried to, anyway. There were just too many questions about too many things unanswered for me to really relax. But I stayed away from the office, didn’t pick up my crystals, and if I did some quiet digging into the name “Roblin” and spent most of my Sunday night dinner with my mentor asking him about potential inter-fatae politics involving Bippis, well... what did the Big Dogs expect, really?

  “I’m sorry, Bonita,” J said. He had made veal piccata, deceptively simple and mouthwateringly delicious. “What little I know matches what you have already discovered. I could ask around, see if my contacts know anything, but... ”

  But his network was at a considerably higher pay grade than the vic’s, so they weren’t going to be much help with the specifics. Now, if we had some kind of high-end political collision going on... .

  I made a quick “avert” sign with my fingers, discreetly hidden by a linen napkin. J frowned on my more old-world superstitions, although he’d just sigh and look away, if he caught me doing it.

  “I wish I could be of more help. I worry about you – which you know.”

  He did. But he also had stood by our agreement, never to poke his nose in unless specifically requested. For a moment – not even a moment – I was tempted to tell him about The Roblin, to see if he could elaborate on Madame’s comments. But odds were he wouldn’t be able to add anything, and then he would really worry.

  My mentor wasn’t a young man anymore. I couldn’t stop doing my job, but I didn’t need to tell him every whisper of trouble that floated in.

  So I went home – J giving me a Translocation-lift from Boston back to New York – without any useful answers, and first thing Monday morning showed up in the office, filled with well-fed energy, ready for something to break wide open.

  Unfortunately, nothing did. In fact, Monday was filled with nothing but a lot of frustration, despite working until nearly ten in the evening trying to tear everything known apart, and put it back together usefully. Nearly a week after the cases landed on our desk, there wasn’t a single peep on the street about who might have ransacked our client’s house, or why, and I had utterly failed to reconstruct my diorama, even with Pietr’s help. And we were no closer to knowing what The Roblin was or why we were involved. Morale, in a word, sucked.

  We gave up on the diorama for the moment, since frustration did not lead to fine-tuned current, and instead spent most of Tuesday morning loading the whiteboard with every detail we had been able to dredge up on the floater, going through the last-time-seen and the river tides to put together a timeline, and not coming up with any plausible leads. The break-in investigation didn’t seem to be going anywhere – the client was stalling us on a list of things that were taken, for some reason having to do with his insurance company – and none of the fatae wanted to talk about the dead Bippis, not one bit. Since the only thing the fatae as a rule liked more than themselves was gossip about other beings, we weren’t sure if they were scared of something, or nobody had an honest, or dishonest, clue. I’d even tapped Bobo, the Mesheadam my mentor had hired as an off-again on-again bodyguard for me, more for J’s peace of mind than my actual safety. Bobo was always willing to help, but he hadn’t come up with anything yet, either.

  Around noon my stomach rumbled, so I left Pietr staring at the board like it was the Rosetta stone, and booked out to grab some fresh air, and lunch.

  Heading down the street, mindfully breathing in the air and letting it clear both my lungs and my brain, I spotted one of “my” missing boys sitting on the stoop. Weirdly, that made me feel better. I ended up in a little corner deli down the street from the office, getting an extra-loaded ham-and-Swiss grinder to go and contemplating adding a couple of cookies to that, when Nifty walked in, clearly in the same “feed me or die” mood. Chasing leads and current-use both burned calories at an impressive rate, and it wasn’t like he was any kind of a delicate flower.

  In fact, Nifty’s dark-skinned bulk seemed to almost spark in the air as he walked, his core getting past him in ways that would have made any mentor worth their salt send him back to schooling. I didn’t say anything. An entire office filled with frustrated Talent? It’s a wonder things weren’t sparking and failing throughout the entire building: I guess the money the guys had put in for shielding and grounding was paying off. And knowing that The Roblin was out there somewhere was making the fact that nothing had actually hit us even worse: we all knew that the quiet was not going to last. Venec had told us he would look for signs of unrest elsewhere, and we were supposed to focus on the cases, but... well, that was a lot easier to say than do.

  My coworker leaned over the counter and gave his order. “Two tuna subs and a large Coke.”

  Nifty was a big guy, I was surprised he hadn’t just gone down another block and gotten a whole pizza.

  “How’s the rash?” I asked him, when I saw he had noticed me.

  “Rashy.” He watched as I pushed money across the counter, and pocketed my change while the guy behind the counter wrapped up my order. “I’m more itchy to get the hell out in the field again, cause I can’t still be contagious after this long. Hell, I’ll wear full-length opera gloves, set a new fashion. You think you can put in a good word with Venec for me?”

  I thought about playing dumb, decided it wasn’t worth it. Even as my irritation boiled over, everything I’d been worrying about, everything I’d been repressing, escaped in a single unguarded, overtired moment.

  “I’m not sleeping with him, and even if I were, what makes you think he’d listen to a damn thing I said if he thought otherwise?” I didn’t wait for Nifty to answer, but took my lunch and stalked out of the deli.

  I knew it. I knew it. Never mind that Nifty hadn’t actually implied that he disapproved of whatever he thought was going on, or given me real grief, it changed the dynamic. The fact that they suspected something was going on inevitably made me less one of the pack and more... what? Venec’s chew-toy, someone he kept around merely for his own amusement?

  No. I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. I was pissed, but not so pissed off I lost track of reality. Nobody who’d ever met Venec would think he took chew-toys. Me, yeah, maybe. But not Venec.

  Did they think that Venec was my chew-toy? The thought was so delightfully absurd I actually stopped dead on the sidewalk, and then had to apologize when a very irritated older woman nearly bumped into me. She glared at me from under perfectly dyed purple bangs, and moved on past.

  Huh.

  I grinned, my unusual spurt of temper fading, and decided that I would not mention that chew-toy thought to Venec. Not that the topic would ever come up, but if it did I suspected he wouldn’t find it as amusing as I did.

  For the first time in weeks, I was able to think about the Merge with something other than annoyance. Yeah, oka
y. Maybe, as long as I was rolling with it, I’d see if I couldn’t get myself cut into the betting action in the office, after all.

  “You work for Stosser.”

  I stopped, a chill hitting my veins. The growling voice came from behind me, slightly to the right, which meant the speaker was on the curb or in the street, and lower down than my shoulder, which meant that they weren’t human-adult height. And the question wasn’t asked like they were looking for someone to hire.

  “I do,” I said. No point in denying it. I reached into my core with a mental hand and gathered a pool of current, letting it slow around imaginary fingers, passive, but ready.

  “Tell him to lay off. Nobody wants his nose in this.”

  This? This what? The break-in? The dead body? Something else Stosser was looking at without bothering to tell any of us? Some case we hadn’t even taken on yet? I hated imprecise threats.

  “If you want me to carry a message,” I said, proud of how calm my voice sounded, “you’re going to have to give me more detail than that. Stosser puts his pointy nose into a lot of things.”

  The voice didn’t think that was funny. It growled, and then something hard and sharp hit me just behind the knees, and I went down onto the pavement, hands flat to keep me from going nose-to-gravel, exactly the way we weren’t supposed to fall.

  “Humans have no place in fatae business,” it said. “Keep to your own kind.”

  I lay there as the sound of heavy footsteps – bare skin, flat feet, I noted mentally – stopped, and the sound of a car door being slammed and a car taking off replaced it.

  The floater, then, most likely. All righty.

  I waved off the offer of help from a passerby who had carefully not seen anything odd happening, and got back to my feet, checking to make sure my sandwich was unmushed. It was. I wish I could say the same for my pants; there was a tear in the left knee that not even a skilled tailor was going to fix. Damn it, I’d liked these pants, too. They were a dark gray wool that moved like silk, and had cost me a small fortune.

  The front door to our office building had been magicked way back when by Venec to recognize our signatures, so I didn’t have to worry about trying to get my keys out of my jacket pocket, but merely pushed the handle with my elbow, and slipped inside. Someone came up behind me, and I held the door open with my foot, just out of common courtesy, without looking. If it was my fatae unfriend come back for another round, it was welcome to come up to the office and make its case to Stosser directly.

  “That’s particularly stupid,” a gravelly male-human-voice said. “What if I’d been a mugger or rapist?”

  “Then I’d kick you in the balls and fry your nerve endings with current,” I said, letting Danny move past me. The P.I. was looking his usual hot self in jeans, leather jacket over a button-down, and scuffed-up cowboy boots, an NYPD cap jammed over his brown curls. The cap was less for weather protection than it was to hide the small nubby horns that peeked out through those curls. Danny was half fatae, half human, and all guy. He’d be a fabulous chew-toy if it weren’t for the fact that I’d sussed right away that he was waiting, if unconsciously, for True Love. Poor bastard.

  “You’re out and about early,” I said. Fauns weren’t night owls as a rule, but Danny had told me once that he got most of his real work done between four in the after noon and four in the morning. It was barely 1:00 p.m., which meant that for him to get here, dressed and awake, he had to have gotten up at least an hour ago.

  “I had a morning meeting with a client,” he said. “Figured as long as I was in your neighborhood, I’d stop by and steal some coffee.”

  “Bullshit. You have something. What do you have?” I started for the stairs, expecting Danny to follow, rather than wait for the elevator. The clomp of his boots on the metal stairs told me he had. Normally, a cutie on my tail like that, I’d put an extra wiggle in my backside just for the heck of it, but this was a business visit. And, anyway, I wasn’t feeling it, today.

  Danny, being Danny, was checking out my ass, any way. I don’t think he could help it. Genetics are a bitch, especially faunish ones.

  “Is it about a pending case, or a future one?” I asked on the second landing, when he didn’t respond to my earlier question. He usually didn’t hold back, not with me, but this might be more than gossip.

  “In the office,” he said when we hit the third landing, his voice not at all winded. I’d expect no less from him, either the discretion or the physical conditioning. When it came to business, Danny was 100% human.

  There was someone coming out of the office across the hallway from our door, which surprised the hell out of me – twice in one week, seeing those doors open, was unusual. We’d taken over two of the office suites on the east side of the building; the other two on the west side housed a tiny literary agency and a one-person photography office, both of which got a lot of mail delivered, but very little actual foot traffic. I let the woman – a pretty blonde, but too hard-edged to be my type – pass, and then ushered Danny into our office.

  He went straight for the coffee machine, not even bothering to take off his coat or say hello to Nick, who was sitting on the sofa weaving current between his fingers. Some people doodled when they thought; he played with current.

  “I don’t know how you people do it, but your coffee’s the best in the city.”

  “Because it’s free?” I suggested.

  “Well, there’s that. Also, the surroundings are pretty.”

  Danny and I flirted like other people took in oxygen, but neither of us were really in the mood today. I knew what my reasons were... what was up with him? He lounged against the kitchenette counter and looked at Nick, his gaze flickering back and forth between fingers, watching the threads of blue and green and orange and red weave in and out like some kind of electric cat’s cradle.

  Actually, I realized, that’s exactly what it was.

  “Anyone else here?” Danny asked, while I shucked my coat and put it in the closet, then sat down on the sofa – a careful distance away from Nick and his thought-process – to eat my lunch before I collapsed from hunger. The vague warning-and-shove from my mysterious fatae could wait until after I ate. It wasn’t as though Stosser was going to listen to it, anyway. The first rule of the office, even before “don’t work at night alone” was “don’t let yourself forget to eat.” Most Talent didn’t have to worry about being called on for a sudden burst of current, without warning. We weren’t most Talent. Also, I had a bad tendency, still, not to top off my core on a regular basis – holdover from being raised, as J said, like a civilian. Being hungry just made the problem worse.

  “Sharon’s in the workroom,” Nick said. “I don’t know where Nifty and Pietr disappeared to.”

  “Nift was getting lunch right behind me,” I said around a mouthful of grinder. “He should be back soon, if he doesn’t eat there.” Mostly we came back to the office, but I could understand him needing a little away-time. I wouldn’t snitch him out to Venec. “Pietr was down the hall half an hour ago – hell, he could be anywhere.”

  As though on cue, we all peered around the room, trying not to look obvious. But no Pietr materialized out of invisibility. He must have gone somewhere else for food.

  “How about your fearless leaders?”

  “They’ve been in the back office powwowing all morning,” Nick said, finally getting tired of his cat’s cradle and letting the current-threads slide back under his skin. “You want we should call them out, or you want to go back in?”

  If Danny went private with what he knew, expecting the Big Dogs to dole out what we needed to know, I’d kill him. He knew it, too.

  “Call ’em,” he said. “Politely – it’s interesting but not urgent.”

  I let Nick do the honors. I might be getting the hang of dealing with the Merge pushing at me all the time, but ever since Venec walked me to my door last week, and that little spark-show in the office, we’d been keeping a very careful distance from each other; walls
up, if not so thick we couldn’t sense each other at all. And now, with Nifty’s comment still warm in my ear... yeah. Let Nick ping him.

  Thinking about that, I decided to hold off telling Stosser about the warning a little longer, until Venec wasn’t around. It had been a message for Stosser, anyway, right? No need to stress Venec about it.

  The sigh I heard in the back of my head was definitely a memory-remnant from my mentor, disappointed in my decision-making, or my avoidance skills. Or both. I ignored it.

  “We’re supposed to go back to the main room,” Nick said.

  While the three available pups filed in, joining Sharon, who was already there, Benjamin Venec took the seat at the table farthest away from the P.I., and leaned back, trying to give every appearance of casualness while studying the other man intently. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Hendrickson; the guy was smart, and professional, and had only been helpful, not to mention carefully polite. In any other setting they’d probably be friends, if not drinking buddies.

  The only complaint he could bring against the guy was that he was a terminal flirt – and that Bonnie responded. Considering their respective personalities and inclinations, the flirting was hardly surprising. Ben swallowed the annoyance. He didn’t have any right to complain – hell, he didn’t have the right to say anything if they were all over each other outside the office. Same way he had no right to frown over the fact that Bonnie and Pietr occasionally warmed sheets together. So long as it didn’t have any impact on their work – and it hadn’t.

  The Merge didn’t see it that way at all. It wanted him to drop-kick the faun out of the office, and Pietr likewise. Ben squelched the urgency the same way he would hunger pains, or the need to pee while he was on stake-out, and listened to what Hendrickson had to say without showing any emotion whatsoever. Hendrickson had been a cop, and he was fatae. That crossed a lot of boundaries, and made him useful. That was all that mattered.