Matheson reared back and looked confused. “Why would they . . . ? In front of me? The Velas did seem anxious to get rid of me, though I still don’t know why. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with the other woman.”
“It’s an unlikely action to take just to drive you away, but it is a very odd coincidence.” The inspector looked thoughtful. “The community hasn’t been assaulted like this before. What happened at the Paz da Sorte attacks the core of the community, makes them feel vulnerable. Perhaps you were simply the last pebble that brings down the Pillars.”
Matheson frowned at the floor.
“Tell me about this morning,” Dillal said.
The younger man jerked his head up and looked startled. “This morning, sir?”
Dillal looked him over, his prosthetic flickering a red gleam as he drew a breath through his nose. “You came from the Dreihleat, and plainly you did not sleep at home.”
Matheson glanced down for a moment before meeting the inspector’s gaze. “That was personal business. Sir.”
Dillal cocked his head slightly and the corner of his mouth twitched. “So I see.” He paused, seeming to recompose his thoughts several times before he spoke again. “We’re on a tightrope with this investigation, Matheson. Be careful.”
“Of course, sir.”
The inspector shook his head. “There is no ‘of course’ to it.” But he didn’t elaborate. Instead he cast another glance over Matheson and seemed uneasy with the other’s disheveled state. Then he looked away. “Clean up and carry on. We need to connect Leran positively to surviving perpetrators, whoever they are. So far, ForTech is failing on that front and we have only five days left.”
Matheson headed down to the Security staff room. Neme and Orris were walking up the hall toward him and he passed them without making eye contact. Then he heard Neme stop and wheel before her voice rang out, “Hey. Rookie. Pull up.”
Ignore her . . . but he turned back, resigned to field whatever unpleasantness the senior detive wanted to throw at him. She closed the distance between them as he gave a minuscule nod. “Sir.” Orris leaned against the wall a couple of meters away, waiting for her with an expression of annoyed boredom.
“Your reports are late.” Neme glanced at Matheson’s face and smirked. “Bad guys playing rough?” Her nose twitched and she cast an assessing glance over him. “What have you been into, puppy?”
“I’ve been working the Dreihleat but the inspector’s been in the building. If you had a question about the reports, you should have gone to him.”
“I shouldn’t have to go to your whip. I’m on your distro list and so far, not one damned report.”
“PIRep and lab reports—” he started, but Neme cut him off.
“I hear you have a dead perp and some lab results no one’s going to like.”
A chill wound up Matheson’s spine.
“Let me suggest,” she continued in a low voice, “that if you are holding back your reports because your investigation touches too close to home for certain people, or on information the administration would prefer to suppress, you will much prefer to have me as an ally than an enemy.”
Matheson glared at her. “Sir. I’m not certain what you’re implying.”
“Get me your reports—all of them—or I will rain hell on you like a summer firestorm in northern Agria.”
“You’ll have to take it up with the inspector, because I can’t help you—no matter how much hell you bring.”
Neme gave him a narrow look and snorted. Then she turned on her heel and strode down the hall, giving Orris a brusque “come on” gesture. The older detive shot Matheson a curious glance, but turned and went with her down the hall toward the central tower.
Neme wanted the reports, yet she already seemed to know things he’d only just learned. It bothered him all the way down to the lockers.
It was just past shift change, so there were about two dozen SOs in the room taking their time before heading home. Matheson ducked his head and slipped through the crowd to his locker, once again avoiding anyone’s eye as he went.
He dodged most of the usual jostling and the occasional jabbing elbow he’d been subject to since his first day. It was basic hazing, but he disliked it nonetheless. The aisle near his locker was mostly deserted and there was an odor that made his stomach roll. He was sure he wasn’t going to be amused when he found out what the source of the stink was. He wedged his shoulder against the frame as he reached to unlock the door, bracing himself for more casual shoves and elbows in the ribs. The door popped open as soon as he lifted the latch. A gush of rotting fish offal sprayed out. The noxious garbage blinded him and he stumbled. He tripped backward over the bench between the rows of lockers and tumbled head first into the next row. His arms and legs tangled in the bench and open locker doors as he tried to thrash back to his feet. He heard a smattering of rough laughter and clenched his teeth in anger, then gagged as he inadvertently swallowed rotten fish. He clawed through the slippery effluvia to grab the bench and pull himself over it, then sit upright enough to free his hands and wipe the worst of the crap out of his eyes and mouth.
“Funny. Fishbait,” he muttered, spitting. He was still blind and not sure how big his audience was. “Very funny.” He stood slowly, determined not to make a bigger spectacle of himself, and turned toward the showers. He was fuming, but he’d be damned if he’d wear rotten fish, even though he had nothing clean to change into. Better a wet uniform than that. His restrained anger made him even more unsteady on the muck-covered floor, but he went forward with deliberate steps. “I get it, you sick bastards.”
Someone walked up behind him—someone wider, but not taller than he was. Halfennig? Tyreda? He couldn’t tell—there was too much stink of rot to tell if the man behind him smelled of the Dreihleat fish market or of citrus soap. “No, you don’t get it,” the man said.
The lights went out and Matheson felt two men scoop him up by the armpits and haul him forward. He felt others brush past him as he was dragged, but they didn’t intervene. “Hey!” he started to yell.
A hard fist rammed into his belly. He coughed out the last of the vile liquid in his mouth as the breath was forced from his lungs. Now they dragged him more easily as he slumped, gasping, between the two unseen men.
There was a dim blue glow ahead—the creeping of exterior illumination through the light pipes into the shower room. Merry fucking hell.
They threw him hard against the dull green slate of the shower stalls. He barely got his arms up to protect his head from impact with the wall. It was an inside corner—had to be the first corner on the right where the cleaning hose poked out of its wall socket. Shit, shit, shit.
“No—” he started, but he didn’t manage the whole word before someone jabbed him in the kidneys. He lurched into the wall, reopening the cut in his eyebrow. His feet slipped out from under him on the wet floor. Someone slapped the side of his head. He lost the rest of his balance and bounced his face off the wall as he fell. His nose broke as he scrambled against the tiles. Warm blood ran down his chin and neck and into his left eye. He rolled back into the corner, groping for a purchase and finding none.
“Someone wash this shit out of here. Fuck, it stinks.” A jet of icy water bored into his chest as he curled on himself. The water almost seemed to hold him in place and he gasped, unable to catch a full breath in the battering cold. Shadows passed through the drenched glow from the light pipes.
Someone—or more than one—rocked his head and chest with a few more blows. Then the hard nozzle of the hose swung into his gut. He doubled over, crouching into a semi-fetal position and bringing his arms up over his head.
“No, no, no . . . we ain’t done with you,” someone whose voice he could have identified if his brain was working, growled into his ear. Big hands shoved past his defense and grabbed his shoulders, yanking him upward with a shaking motion that uncoiled Matheson’s pain-weakened limbs. “You don’t get to roll up and hide just yet.”
<
br /> The looming shape in front of him kneed him in the groin.
Matheson let out a breathless squeal. The man dropped him back to the wet slate floor. “Now you can be a fucking bug.”
The hose slammed across his back and sides, across his hips . . . He lost count of the blows, then the kicks. Distantly, he noted that the nozzle never struck him again and they avoided any further damage to his face.
When they stopped, he wasn’t sure how much of his body was still attached to the rest. What didn’t hurt was dead-numb from the cold water. Someone crouched down beside him—he could make out the person’s bulk through the blood and swelling. No face, just a shape.
The shape began talking, punctuating its points with a jabbing finger against Matheson’s broken nose. “You don’t upset the natural order here, Fishbait. You don’t step over your brothers and sisters on the street. You don’t snoop and pry into their business and stab them in the back. You don’t suck up to Investigation. You don’t jump the queue. And you don’t go grass. Get it, Fishbait?”
Matheson wasn’t sure he could answer, but he managed a weak nod and a moan of pain.
“Good, becau—”
His interrogator might have said something more, but the lights flicked on and another voice roared into the hollow staff room “What the fuck is going on here?!”
Matheson could hear the SOs who’d beaten him scuttling away like cockroaches.
“What are you stupid motherhumpers doing? Shit! Get the hell out of here! Get out!”
The owner of the voice drew closer, shouting and, from the sound of it, handing out a few blows of his own. The shouting man stopped near Matheson. “Shivering Suvil on a stick. What the hell . . . ? Matheson? What the fuck?”
The man hunkered down and hoisted him partially upright, then leaned him back to sit against the shower corner.
Matheson blinked, but couldn’t clear enough of the blood out of his eyes to be sure who he was looking at. He was shivering too hard to raise his hands and wipe his own face.
“You look as bad as you smell. What is that stink?”
“Fishbait,” Matheson muttered. The word came out slushy due to his bloating lip and broken nose.
The man dabbed at his face with a moist cloth—it felt like a clean-up wipe from a scene kit. Matheson whimpered as the solvent stung his cuts and the motion of the rag disturbed his nose and the quick swelling around his eyes. When the wipe was withdrawn, he blinked again.
Orris. All Matheson managed was a lisping mumble.
Orris stooped to put his shoulder under Matheson’s and drag him to his feet. “C’mon, c’mon . . . you need to stand up and get to Public Health. What the hell happened?”
“Stepped on toes,” Matheson tried. It came out “shept on doesh.”
“You should file a complaint.”
Matheson shook his head and regretted it. His brain felt loose in his skull and everything else had to be bruised, torn, or broken. He was nauseated and his mouth still tasted of rotten fish and blood. He gagged and spat blood onto the wet slate floor, grateful that he hadn’t expectorated any teeth as well.
Orris straightened him up again, wearing an expression of suppressed disgust. He maneuvered Matheson to another corner of the shower and propped him in it. “I hate to do this, but you stink, rook. Grab hold of something for a minute.”
Orris turned on all the closest shower heads. The water came out cold, but soft at first, then warmed up and turned into little needles that stung Matheson’s skin right through his filthy clothes. He squirmed and worked his way out of the water on shaking legs, clutching at control handles and ledges to hold himself up.
Orris stood in the shower room with his arms crossed over his chest, watching him. When the senior detive was satisfied, he turned off the sprays. “Well, you still look like shit, but you don’t stink like it. Who stomped you?”
Matheson shrugged wordless denial. Just want outta here alive.
“You’re a fucking moron, rook. Your fellow patch pounders beat you into a heap because you . . . what? Had to question your TO about his part in a crime? Better you than someone else.”
Matheson tried to shake his head, but the motion darkened his vision at the edges and brought nausea wrenching through his gut. He twisted aside, holding tight to the nearest ledge, and threw up. There wasn’t much to lose, but it still hurt like fuck. Memory of the taste of Aya’s skin and the flavor of tea was drowned in pain and humiliation. “I’m,” he said, still trying to clear his mouth, “out of order.”
“You need a doctor.”
“No. No report . . .” That would only sideline him and turn attention that Dillal didn’t need on the investigation.
Orris looked disgusted. “You are sollet-screwing stupid. You’re playing by their rules!”
“Uh-huh.” Matheson straightened out enough to rinse his mouth and face in the nearest shower spray, letting the bile he’d cast up run down the drain.
“You going to the health center now? Before you kill yourself?”
“No.” He stumbled as he tried to walk away and Orris caught him, putting a shoulder under his armpit again to brace him up.
“Fuck you,” the older man said. He wrapped his near arm around Matheson’s back and pressed the business end of a standard issue shock box against his side. At contact, the effect would be concentrated and narrow as a knife blade—before Matheson passed out it would feel just like one, rusty, dull, and tearing viciously through his intercostal muscles. “You’re going to the doctor if I have to drop you in your tracks. You can walk or I can haul you. I’ll even fox the report if that’s what you want.”
Matheson tried to resist one more time, pretty sure it was useless. “Dillal—”
“Gas that. You can talk to your damned whip when you can say his name without dribbling blood. Now, come on.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Day 3: Evening
“I’ve got the family lines isolated, but I can’t get any farther without the database to match through.”
Dillal didn’t look up from a bloody mass he was separating with meticulous strokes of a pair of forceps. “I told you to sleep.”
“I can’t. You need this. You need me.” Starna was shivering, pupils huge, eyes wide, speaking too fast. A trickle of blood had dried just behind his right earlobe and in a thin line running halfway down his neck.
“I do not need you, and this information is not worth your life. I can run the matches through births and deaths myself, though I believe I already know who I’ll find.”
Starna didn’t seem to have heard him. “But look! I’m a few minutes’ work away from getting the name!” Most of the med/legals and techs remaining in the lab had turned to look at Starna as his voice rose. “If you’ll just let me access the records—”
Dillal dropped his forceps and turned so quickly that Starna jumped back. “I ordered you to go home and sleep. You chose to ignore my orders,” he said in a low, sharp voice. “You are not fit for work.”
“I don’t need sleep—” the tech shouted.
“Not when you’re riding a hit of Wire, of course not! Do you even understand the concept of tainted evidence?”
“I’m not—”
Dillal swiped his fingertips behind Starna’s ear and held his hand up between them. Particles of dried blood clung to the skin and under his nails. The sight struck Starna dumb; the only sound in the lab was the hushed whine and click of the inspector’s ocular. “As bright to me as a luminous tide,” he said. “Do you doubt that I can see it, or smell the chemical signature in your blood?”
Starna shook and panted, his gaze darting around the room as if he were frozen in place and looking for someone to save him. No one stepped forward.
“Leave your work with me and go home before all your research is too compromised to use,” Dillal said. “You’re no use to me in this state. And if you can’t curb your habits, you’ll be no use to me at all.”
Starna quivered, then swung a
round and bolted from the lab. The only sounds were his footsteps and the spinning of machines.
Matheson was not a priority, no matter how much water and blood he dripped on the health center’s floor. An automated freight lifter had clipped an inbound worker transport from Agria as it had set down, and his injuries barely rated a towel until the desperately broken were attended to.
A cranky PA got to him after a few hours and poked him with devices he couldn’t even name. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ve loaded you up with viral bots that will speed the healing process. You’re going to be very stiff, sore, and tired for about two days, and really hungry. Then you’ll be pretty achy for a few more days after that. Just sleep, eat, drink a lot of water, and take the pills. How did you say this happened?”
“I didn’t.”
“Ah . . . well . . .” She reached out and re-set his nose with a pop that made Matheson yelp and weep sticky pink tears. “There, Mr. I’m-not-going-to-turf-my-friends. Don’t worry. You’ll be as pretty as ever—just a little lump in the middle is all.”
Like the mattress that Matheson was longing to get horizontal with. And to think I imagined a broken nose might be rakish . . . I’m an idiot.
He hated the place more with each visit and he couldn’t even enjoy the billion-real view. After a few more hours of watching him to be sure he didn’t pass out or piss blood, they sent him home.
The various chemicals he’d been anointed, injected, and sprayed with were doing their jobs fairly well and he could see out of both eyes by the time he reached his flat’s door. He was achy, itchy, and dopey and he wasn’t sure his brain was hooking up the signals from his eyes correctly.
The short man waiting by his door had turned so his face was largely in shadow, hiding all but the unnatural shape of his skull and the red spark of light reflected through the lens of his gold eye.
Matheson stared at him. “Inspector?”
Dillal moved away from the door and gestured Matheson toward it. “We’ll talk inside.” He seemed tense and annoyed.
Blood Orbit_A Gattis File Novel Page 17
