Still, he found himself jogging, in spite of overloading the capability of his CoolTherm undershirt.
The building was a well-built multi-story condo stack near the working waterfront of East Quay with a view of the cove—if you leaned out a bit to see around the two other buildings between it and the water. Santos’s was a corner unit high enough up to catch a faint breeze. It was nicer than Matheson’s fold-out single room by a long measure, even if the area did have a stronger odor of sea water and industry than his. Corruption pays well.
Matheson didn’t bother sending another ping to Santos, he just passed his ID through the electronic outer door and coded it open. He was not going to let Santos or his wife put him off again. What’ll they do? Throw me out the window?
The door gave way and he went up to the appropriate floor in the dry cool of the elevator. His uniform shirt and singlet had unstuck from his back by the time he reached the unit he wanted.
He didn’t bother with the courtesy bell but pounded on the door. “Santos! It’s Matheson. C’mon! Let me in.”
Santos’s voice came shakily from close inside the door. “I don’t want to talk to you, Fishbait. I’m fuckin’ fine without you. Just fine. Go the hell away.”
“I’m not going to,” Matheson shot back. “You know what a pain in the ass I am—you tell me so often enough. I’m going to camp here for as long as it takes. You know I have to ask you questions.” He remembered a discussion they’d had about the various senior ofiçes and added, “Better me than the blue-haired harpy.” Santos didn’t like Neme any better than Matheson did and he hoped Santos didn’t know she was no longer on the case.
The door unlatched. “Can’t get rid of you, can I?”
Matheson leaned through the doorway cautiously and glanced around. Santos stood nearby, clutching a cylinder of beer and looking unsteady on his bare feet. “No. Can I come in or are you going to brain me with that?”
Santos peered at him, swaying a little. His brown complexion was mottled from drinking. “Don’t know. What’s with your face?”
“I had a business meeting with an irresistible force.”
Santos grunted. “You can come in, but I’m not talkin’ to nobody but you. You don’t got that bitch behind you, do you?”
“Neme? No. I’m alone. She’s not even on the case anymore.”
“She’s not? What? What happened?” Santos asked, backing toward the living room. Being relieved of the specter of Neme hadn’t soothed his nerves any.
Matheson eased inside, looking down both arms of the entry corridor, just in case. Three pairs of footwear lay in disarray beside the door. “I’m supposed to take your work boots for elimination when I go,” he said.
Santos shrugged without turning. “Whatever.”
Matheson followed Santos into the main room. It was sunny, but cool with forced dry air that smelled of meat stewing with hot pepper and onion. He glanced around and saw a large sitting room, a small dining area that led to a balcony in the window corner, and a kitchen counter that divided the space facing the bank of windows. Santos’s wife lurked in the kitchen, out of easy earshot, but able to keep an eye on both men while she worked.
Christa Santos was a round, muscular woman about fifty, under average height, and with the bearing of a queen. If she wasn’t pure Ohba, she wasn’t far removed. Her skin was a russet color only a little lighter than her auburn hair. Given the deep-seated hatred and continual violence between the Ohba and Dreihleen, it struck Matheson strange that she’d marry a cop who worked in the Dreihleat. Yet there she was.
She turned to stare at Matheson, her eyes a startling shade of leaf green. She narrowed her gaze, looking him over as if assessing his threat level. Finally, she gave a dismissive snort and returned to her work. He turned to find a seat close to Santos, listening to Christa in the kitchen making a steady noise that sounded like a knife thumping into a butcher block.
Santos was a little older than his wife. At the moment, the difference seemed like a decade or more, though Matheson knew it wasn’t. Before their last night on patrol, he’d seemed solid and massive; now his shoulders sagged and his fat hung like bagged sand, as if he’d lost fifteen kilos overnight. He was wearing deeply wrinkled uniform trousers with a blue shirt unbuttoned over a CoolTherm singlet, all stained with yellow blotches.
Santos had sunk into an overstuffed arm chair that looked like it was slowly digesting him. Several dozen drink cylinders had piled up at the chair’s side. “You gonna ask me questions about that night. At Paz.”
“Yeah,” Matheson replied, sitting down on the edge of the couch that matched the chair.
“Who’s on it?” Santos demanded, staring at Matheson with rheumy, red eyes.
“Who what?” Matheson asked.
“Who’s the IOC?”
“Orris was IOD.”
Santos shook his head and leaned forward, fighting his way out of the chair’s embrace with a panicked expression. “No! I know Orris was Investigation Officer of the Day. Who’s in charge if not Neme? Who’s the Investigation Ofiçe in Charge? Who?”
“J. P. Dillal.”
A fresh waft of hot spices and a sharp scent of citrus floated into the room on the harsh clatter of pots and pans against the stove grates.
“The CIFO?” Matheson noted that Santos made a word of the acronym. Dillal seemed to be the only person who used the initials or full title. “Fuck! They’re gonna crucify me. I didn’t do anything to those people. I knew them! I wouldn’t—” Santos turned his head aside, clenching his eyes and mouth shut as if fighting the urge to vomit. In a moment, he gasped, catching his breath, but he didn’t turn back to face Matheson. He looked toward the kitchen and the bright windows beyond. His words came out wet and slurred from drink and misery. “I knew the Initols and that thick cousin of theirs, Loni. And they didn’t mind—” Then he turned his head and glared at Matheson. “You’re gonna ask if I killed them. Well, I didn’t!”
Matheson shook his head. “I wasn’t going to ask that.”
“No? You’re not working with the CIFO?”
“I am, but that’s not what I was going to ask you. I know you didn’t kill those people—you didn’t have time.”
“That’s all you think is going to save my neck? That I didn’t have time? What do you want to know? How I did it?” Santos’s voice rose to a hysterical pitch.
“No. I just want to know what time you really entered the jasso.”
“I don’t know what time! I was with you, Mr. Meticulous. What’s your log say? Whatever your log says, that’s what it is.”
“It doesn’t matter what my log says, Santos. Show me yours.”
Santos took a drink from his beer, hands shaking. “I ain’t got it.”
“Because you broke the screen on your mobile, so you didn’t hash the incident. But the auto-upload should still have gone through eventually, even if it couldn’t reach a connection at the time.”
Matheson paused and watched Santos, who said nothing. Matheson’s gut twisted in disgust—as much at what he was about to do as at Santos. “I can’t find the file. It was never uploaded. There’s no record of your movements after we split. We don’t know if you were in the building or if you stayed outside as you said you did. I know you didn’t kill anybody but that doesn’t mean you weren’t involved.”
The older man’s face was red and damp now, his mouth tight as he held something in, but his hands were trembling. Still he kept silent.
“Did you break the mobile on purpose because you knew—?”
“It was an accident!” Santos said, choking on the words.
“A convenient accident. Because you were planning ahead.”
Santos’s expression twisted into sodden bitterness. “You’re thinkin’ like fuckin’ Dillal already—you think I’m some kinda master criminal.”
“No. I think you had something you needed to do that you knew I wouldn’t like—or that the Initols wouldn’t like me to see. You had to pick up the p
rotection money and you didn’t want to cut me in or make the Initols nervous, so you made a reason to send me the long way. I notice you’re not limping now.”
Santos lurched a bit in his chair and glared.
“Even broken, the mobile should have uploaded your position, it should have given you an alibi, but it didn’t—I did.” Matheson let his voice grow louder as he talked, keeping his gaze on Santos the whole time. “You made sure I knew exactly when we parted—you made me hash the time. You put me on the hook for the upload reports. You didn’t need an alibi—or you didn’t know you would—and that’s the only reason I don’t believe you were in on this thing. Because no matter how greedy you were, you weren’t stupid enough to implicate yourself in murder. So why didn’t the upload run?”
Santos had gone pale and his face was slick, but he didn’t reply.
“Why didn’t it run?” Matheson repeated louder, leaning forward.
Santos shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut.
Matheson rose to his feet so he loomed over the older ofiçe. “Why didn’t it run?” he demanded.
Santos surged to his feet and flung the beer cylinder against the nearby wall with force enough to flatten the stiff thermal film and spray chilled liquid onto the surface in two brown fans. “Because I shut it off!” he shouted, staggering from the motion. He grabbed the back of the chair to keep from falling and glared at Matheson. “I shut it off, you smartass bastard,” he muttered thickly, “to keep you from finding out I was pickin’ up the bag. ’Cause you’re so fuckin’ pure.” Then he turned unsteadily and looked toward the kitchen.
Matheson glanced the same way and saw Christa Santos step out carrying a heavy frying pan. Hot oil dripped from it onto the floor, sending black smoke curling up from the tiles. Her expression was wary and she watched Matheson like a guard dog. He turned back to Santos, hoping Christa wasn’t easing forward to smash his head in.
Santos waved her off as he held onto the chair with his other hand. He swayed a little in place and his eyes weren’t quite focused. “Happy?” he muttered.
Matheson waited until he heard Christa put the pan down on the stove. “No,” he said. “It’ll go against you, but it’s better than what I thought I’d hear.”
“Like this could get worse . . .” Santos said and turned to drop back into his seat, shivering from his dying rage and boneless with drink.
Matheson took a long breath to pack down his own adrenaline and leaned his weight against the beer-stained wall. “Tell me if I’m off base here,” he started. “Even if we hadn’t had that incident with the pickpocket, you’d have found an excuse to fake an injury so I wouldn’t question your dodging your extra shift later or splitting then so you could head to Paz alone. Maybe the mobile breaking was a lucky accident, maybe it wasn’t, but either way, you’d have my log to confirm you were injured and on rounds like you should have been. You knew I wouldn’t ask any hard questions because, while I may be naive and too by-the-book for my own good, I’m still a rookie and you’re my TO.”
“Yeah.”
Matheson glanced away for a moment and sighed. “You lied to me and you set me up. You’re just as corrupt as everyone else in this stinking system, but you’re not a killer.” He turned back to Santos. “So help me prove that you’re not. Tell me when you entered the Paz da Sorte the first time—I know you did because you were way too close to jumpwise over a locked door. I don’t have to know the exact hash time, just how long it was before you called me to rejoin you. Twenty minutes? Ten minutes? Five?”
Santos rolled his head against the back of the chair, his eyelids fluttering, his speech slowing. “About six, seven minutes maybe. I had a key. I unlocked and . . . the lights were off. But I could smell it, and it was so still in there . . . I knew it was somethin’ bad. Somethin’ real bad.”
“How far did you go into the room?”
“I didn’t. No. Like . . . maybe a step or two. I didn’t leave the tiles, ’cause I could feel ’em under my feet and I thought, when I started feelin’ dizzy, that they was broken and sliding around. So I got out and locked it back up. And I called you, and then I ran to the end of the cross-alley and threw the key down a drain. Man, you almost got to the door before I did. I thought you were gonna notice, but you didn’t say nothin’.”
“The drain.” Matheson repeated, feeling foolish for not checking it himself, though ForTech would have. “I thought you were pacing, like you were impatient for me to arrive.”
“Wasn’t impatient. I was scared what we were gonna see. I didn’t want to go back in there.”
“Did you see anyone else in the alley or nearby before or after you went into the jasso?”
Santos shook his head miserably. “No.”
“Do you remember who was in the club on our earlier round? Did you look inside?”
“I didn’t. You remember: we walked on by ’cause there wasn’t nothin’ looked fishy. I wish I had looked, but I didn’t want you to notice nothin’ was different. So I didn’t.”
Matheson nodded. He remembered it the same way. “All right.” He straightened from the wall.
Santos stared at him from under drooping lids as if he had no energy to move—and no desire. “I didn’t kill them,” he said.
Matheson fixed his eyes on his TO’s face, though he had an itchy desire to check on Christa. “I know that.”
“Yeah. Well. Bully for you. That’s not gonna help me, much. With the CIFO on it, it’s gonna be a rush job. If they can’t find someone else they like, they’re gonna say I did it or covered it up. They’re gonna hang me up and say it was me, and they’re gonna slam the lid on this case like the lid on my coffin. And if this don’t all go their way, they’re gonna come after you too, Fishbait. You better keep your head down or that face is gonna be the least of your hurts.”
“‘They’ who?” Matheson asked, thinking of Jora and Halfennig, and the sort of people his family utilized to get around “obstacles” in their way.
For a few trembling seconds, Santos seemed frightened, then he narrowed his eyes, and replied, “GISA and their butt buddies. The rich guys out on the Quay. They don’t want this investigated. They want it swept into a box and dropped in the sea. Better yet, hung around some Ohba’s neck so they can call it an ethnic thing and wipe ’em off the face of the planet.”
“Why?”
Santos closed his eyes and a tear that was at least as much alcoholic depression as it was water leaked down his cheek. “C’mon Fishbait . . . you think it’s any kinda coincidence that sixty percent of the internees in the camps on Agria are Dreihleen and Ohba and the rest are mixed? And most die in their first two years? The cits don’t get sent—they contract when they’re too damned hard-up to get out. Gattians? Never, fuckin’ ever go up, no matter what they did. That whole continent’s a friggin’ death camp so Gattis Corp can cover up their dirty deeds.”
“What dirty deeds?”
Santos just rambled on. “Why do you think they got the CIFO on a Dreihleat killing? Because they give a shit about dead yellow guys? They give a shit about money, just like any other corporation—’specially when they own the whole friggin’ planet! Do whatever they want, and stick the blame on someone else. CIFO’s a blind and Pritchet and his Corp House friends’ll squeeze him till he gives ’em what they want. That magic answer-ball forensic crap don’t work. You think they picked Dillal for his skills? They picked him ’cause he’s trash they can threaten and screw over and then flush down the crapper when they’re done with him and ain’t nobody gonna care.”
Matheson clenched his teeth, holding back his frustration and anger. “You’re wrong. No matter who thinks they can pull his strings, the inspector’s not going to let someone roll him over.”
Santos shook his head. “You’re exactly as fresh as you look.”
“Damn you, Santos. I’m trying to help you, but if you don’t believe I can—we can—then to hell with you.”
Santos struggled up from his chair, sho
uting, “To hell with me? To hell with you! I got my feet on the ground—the ground of Gattis as it is, not as I wish it fuckin’ were in some fuckin’ college-boy universe where bad shit only happens to bad people! This is a screwed up world where the guys with the money and the right DNA run the game and everyone else scrambles to get what they can before the guns swing their way. And don’t you give me that crap about the charter—the charter’s the fuckin’ problem, you highbrow jackass! Guys with power don’t like to share!”
“I know that!” Matheson shot back. “If you think I don’t, I’m not the only jackass in the room. And this may be just one rotten case that means nothing to anyone but me and Dillal, but I will do everything I can to make it go right!” He was breathing hard and he hadn’t thought he meant it until the words were out of his mouth. He sent a paranoid glance toward the kitchen, looking for Christa, but she only stood behind the counter and stared at him with a blank expression.
He turned back and watched Santos’s anger fade to sorrow. The older man shook his head. “Fuck me. They’re gonna jam me up and hang me out to dry. You, they’re gonna cut into little pieces and throw off the Pillars like chum. Fishbait, boy. You’re fucking fishbait.”
Andreus had removed the ocular from the prosthetic frame, twisting it out of Dillal’s head with a device that looked like a black, three-clawed bird’s foot. Dillal hadn’t flinched as her hand pressed against his cheekbone, but it came at the cost of a close-bitten bark of pain. She served him a narrow-eyed glare as she cleaned the frame without gentleness, and then stepped back, putting the eyepiece aside for a moment.
She pointed a finger at his face. “You are pushing far too near the edge. Let me be perfectly clear about this: When something goes wrong that close to the brain, the progress from illness to death is swift. An infection could kill you and even your extraordinary immune system won’t save you. If the implants don’t integrate properly and your body rejects them, you’ll die. If the system over reaches and becomes invasive, you’ll die. I watched it happen to your predecessors and let me assure you that none of these are pleasant ways to go. Your chance of surviving a surgical deintegration is better than any of the previous subjects, but at this point it’s still less than ten percent. You should have had six weeks supervised recovery. You had two. If things go well, you might be stable at week three. If not, catastrophic failure becomes more likely.”
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 12
