Snake Eyes

by Megan Sybil Baker

  Snake Eyes

  Megan Sybil Baker

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. The E.I.I.s were as fresh as the warm blood pooling beneath the dead man’s shoulders. And just as lifeless.

  I opened my eyes. In the shadows of the opulent hotel suite, a few feet from where I knelt beside the body, Kieran watched, waited, unofficially of course. He’d insisted on accompanying me. Said it was because he hated having his best laid plans— he’s annoyingly fond of puns— interrupted. We’d been more undressed than dressed in our own hotel room, doing what lovers often did after a night in Taythis’ casinos and an excellent bottle of champagne, when every pleasurable sensation had been violently wrenched from my existence. The only thing I could feel was the Racker 750 pressed hard against my breastbone. Then the excruciatingly intense flare of pain as my killer sent three discharges of illegal Z-4 ammo tumbling through my body, clawing, raking, stripping my insides as they spun. I died, slowly it seemed, but in truth it was less than five minutes.

  I knew how long it took because I stared at the clock when the first sickening chill of fear flashed through me. And I was staring at the clock now.

  Five minutes. Five minutes for me to throw on the clothes Kieran had thrust into my hands, shove my feet into my soft boots, my gun into the waistband of my pants. I’d hesitated only long enough to snatch my Intergalactic Conclave-issue I.D. from the dresser. The one with my holo and badge and official title: Dr. Jynx San’Janeiro, P.I..

  Hotel security had responded promptly to Kieran’s call to the front desk because Kieran was Kieran Risardas, after all. The wiry, amber skinned man in the dark uniform clearly hadn’t been expecting me as well in the hotel corridor.

  “M’Lord.” He’d nodded respectfully to Kieran but let his dark gaze linger a bit on my hastily clothed form. The oversize v-necked sweater and leggings were hardly seduction fare. It had felt good to shove my badge in his face, watch him recoil, choke slightly. Play-toy, he’d labeled me. Rich man’s play-toy. Hot little redhead.

  Only the last two adjectives were correct. The first was about as far from fact as you could get. I’d been shivering, my skin chilled. Death, fresh, stark, invasive, does that to most psychic investigators. As I’d been a hotel hallway width from the murder, it felt as if it were doing it double time to me.

  “You’re sure?” His name tag said Granville, Security Chief, and his tone was pure skeptic. ‘Mind fucker,’ he tagged me, though I’ve been called worse. He pushed his master keycard in the slot on the suite’s double doors as he asked, so I didn’t bother answering him. Didn’t bother telling him yes, I was sure there was a dead man on the other side of the doors. A man very recently murdered. Which meant Granville had a bigger problem than his squeamishness at having a psychic investigator by his side.

  He had a murderer on the loose in his exclusive hotel.

  Now he had a P.I. kneeling before the sprawled, bloodied form of the man’s body, reliving again and again, through the Emotionally Intensified Images, the spike of fear, the hard feel of the gun, the low ugly growl of a man’s voice, then pain. Searing, ripping, clawing pain.

  But nothing else.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. More than feel, more than hear, I was supposed to be able to see what the dead man, one Pavin Truedell according to Granville, had seen in his last minutes alive.

  I saw nothing. Fear of a different kind gripped my gut.

  Granville hovered. “Standby,” he said for the second time into his comm badge. It crackled with information and questions.

  “All exits sealed. Security on every floor. We need that damned description!”

  Yes, they did. I couldn’t give them one.

  I sat back on my haunches, sucked in a long breath. Forced a word, a medical term I never wanted to hear from my mind. Went into the E.I.I.s again.

  ~~

  “Who’s there?”

  A rustle of fabric, a sound in the quiet of my bedroom startled me awake. I leaned up on my elbows, the sheet sliding part way down my chest. I could feel a slight movement of air against my skin; heard a small hush of a sound. But no answer to my question.

  How many drinks had I had? More than I’d wanted to, but the music had been so nice. I hadn’t heard someone play the piano like that in years. Musical ability was not one of my talents.

  “Why not, you’ve got good hands?” Dionosio used to tease, then laugh that grinding laugh of his. He knew why.

  But he was right. I had good hands. I flexed my fingers against the soft bed sheets. Long ago I’d been taught a good way to identify the distance of an unknown sound is to make a known one of your own. The bed sheets were an arm’s length from my ears. I heard the scrunch of the fabric clearly.

  Not so the soft, smooth noise that woke me. Not so the hush of a sound that had disappeared into the corner of my bedroom. I tilted my face, listening again.

  ~~

  “The lights were off in his suite when the murderer came in,” I told Granville, but I looked at Kieran as well. His concern washed over me. He knew I was struggling. And had known me long enough to know that wasn’t routine.

  It had been a year and a half since his first wife had been murdered, and I’d been called in, four days late, on the case. The E.I.I.‘s had been fading, but they’d been intact enough for me to see Vandora’s murderer through her own eyes.

  And other things, as well. Things that told me Kieran was someone as out of place in this life as I was, though for different reasons.

  His reasons didn’t bother me any more than my being a P.I. bothered him.

  Granville wasn’t as forgiving. “You can’t get a description? I thought you people could tell everything.”

  “I can tell you,” I said, running one hand through my hair, snagging a few knots as if that could clear the blankness in my mind, “that the murderer was male, about the same height as the victim.”

  ~~

  Something hard shoved against my chest as I swung my feet off the edge of the bed. A callused hand grasped by elbow, yanked me up, but not easily.

  “What the fuck!” I stumbled forward, cracked my forehead against my attacker’s. But the hard cold metal against my skin stopped any further movement.

  “Quiet!” a harsh voice rumbled in my ear. Something pungent on the man’s breath reached my nose. It was a smell I couldn’t identify, not yet. I knew it, but…

  The gun in my chest was of greater concern. I had more than just good hands. I had good ears, too. I heard the low, distinct humming noise of a fully charged Racker 750. Small, easily concealed, very expensive. I’d often thought about carrying one, but my marksmanship skills were worse than my nonexistent musical abilities. Good hands notwithstanding.

  “What do you want?” I managed to whisper. Quietly. When a man points a Racker 750 at you and demands quiet, you comply.

  ~~

  The information on the Racker wasn’t new. I’d told Granville about the weapon when we first spotted the body lying in front of the living room’s large window. Through the gauzy drapery drawn across it, the lights of the spaceport twinkled dimly in the distance. Not the commercial spaceport, but the private one, for the use of the casino’s privileged guests. Like Pavin Truedell, whose good hands hadn’t been able to prevent his own death.

  “The murderer had an odor.” I thought again of Truedell’s sensation of disgust, yet familiarity. “Something he ate, or drank. It was unpleasant.”

  “But what did he look like?”

  “I haven’t found that out yet.”

  Granville’s lip curled but any further comment was stopped by Kieran’s forward movement, and the doors of the suite sliding open. A med-‘droid with the emblem of the coroner’s office on its chest glided in.

  A dark-haired
woman in a tailored brown suit hurried behind the ‘droid, her wrist comm raised to her mouth. She had the high cheekbones, exotic features of a Chi’ann princess. But her voice and demeanor were one hundred per cent street-cop in command. “Yeah, yeah. I’m on site now. Coroner’s here too. Tell Alby he’d better have the Gods-damned report in my files when I return. Or he’ll be back in uniform, scrounging for fucking doughnuts by noon tomorrow. Today,” she corrected herself, tapped her unit off with her thumb.

  Today. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. I’d been working Truedell’s E.I.I.s for almost an hour.

  “Lieutenant Iago, Homicide.” She switched a look from Granville to Kieran to me.

  I rose. She extended her hand.

  “Dr. San’Janeiro, Psychic Investigation Division 1.” I reached for my badge, tucked into the waistband of my pants, so I could pretend not to see how quickly she withdrew her hand. “I was across the hall when the murder took place.”

  Granville’s name tag proclaimed his identity. Iago thrust her chin towards Kieran. “You?” Her eyes narrowed slightly but not in a negative way. She’d probably recognize Kieran in a moment from the society vids, or the political ones, but for now he was simply unknown male. Tall, dark and gorgeous, but unknown male.

  “Kieran Risardas.”

  I felt recognition hit her. Tall, dark, gorgeous and incredibly wealthy. A smile played across her mouth. “Acquainted with the deceased, Lord Kieran?”

  “I’m Dr. San’Janeiro’s husband. Neither one of us knew the deceased. We had the misfortune to be in the room across the hall.”

  Her smile thinned, turned professional. “What do you have?” she asked me.

  I told her. Her professional smile turned to puzzlement, then a frown. “You felt the whole murder happen and you can’t give me a description?”

  “I’m still working on that.”

  “You said you’re Division 1.”

  “Yes.” Division 1 was the top P.I. outfit in the Conclave.

  “You’re new, then. Who’s your chief?”

  “Me.” I’d received two promotions since the Vandora Mar-Risardas murder. Which was why Kieran was now feeling angry and more than overprotective at Lieutenant Iago’s insinuations, and Lieutenant Iago was staring at me in disbelief. Granville was smirking.

  “The lights were off in the room.” I motioned to the gauzy curtain covering the large window. “Other than the spaceport, there’s nothing but forest out there. No good light source.”

  Two ‘droids appeared in the doorway with a anti-grav gurney, a forensic tech behind them. The tech holoed the suite, scanned for prints while Iago and the coroner examined the body.

  “Can they take him?” Iago asked.

  I nodded. The ‘droids zipped Truedell’s remains in a body bag and headed back to the morgue.

  Maybe the autopsy could tell them something. I sure as hell couldn’t.

  Granville however, offered Iago the hotel’s records on Truedell. She’d pick those up on her way out, run his I.D. through C.C.I.C. for priors while the rest of her squad searched the hotel for a man with a Racker 750.

  “I want to stay here a bit longer, go through his things,” I told Iago. She shrugged, her low opinions of P.I.s dropping lower, and posted a uniformed officer in the hallway. She handed Kieran her card. “Comm me if she gets anything.”

  Or comm me, anyway? That was unspoken, but I felt it, heard it. Saw her undressing my husband in her mind.

  Which was more than I’d been able to get from Pavin Truedell’s E.I.I.s.

  Why? I sat on the silk-covered sofa after she left, scrubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands. All the useless platitudes drifted by. I’d been working too hard. Taking too many cases. Kieran had been commenting, no. Complaining about that for several months now. You need some time off, he’d said. But aside from the fact that I had a file full of pending cases, the usual vacation spots didn’t interest me. I hated crowds, hated the close packed density of humanity that I could never totally shut out of my mind. It was why I’d finally agreed to come to Taythis. The playground of the mega-wealthy who could afford the rarity of privacy. Only four large suites to a floor. Private dining rooms, gaming rooms.

  And a murder, for the first time, I couldn’t solve. Might never be able to solve again.

  There are things worse than death. Being born not only psychic but a revenant means I exist in both worlds. That of the living and of the dead. It’s why people don’t touch me, why people don’t like to talk to me, for any longer than necessary. My present existence is constantly tied with other people’s pasts. Other people’s deaths.

  Only Kieran understood. But then Kieran, for all of his forty six years of life, was over five hundred years old. That was one of his secrets his late wife had carried to her grave. One of the many secrets he trusted me with. I understood what it meant to have lived too long, to be weary.

  And I was. But my weariness for the first time carried a new and chilling edge.

  I was a revenant, but when the revenant abilities fail it inevitably leads to a brutal decaying of the mind, and insanity. It’s one of the few maladies the medical labs in the Conclave haven’t been able to cure. That and the common cold. All other diseases, all other infirmities had disappeared centuries ago.

  Except for the sniffles, and Revenant Regression Syndrome. R.R.S..

  If that’s what this was, this inexplicable block I felt when trying to read Truedell’s E.I.I.s, then I might just go seeking one of those Racker 750s he’d felt were so useful as weapons.

  “You’re tired.” Kieran folded his hands over mine with a gentleness that belied his infamous title of five centuries past: The Butcher of Sinder Station. He shrugged off history’s misstatement with a casualness I envied. I rarely forgot the responsibilities of my job, what I was, or more importantly, what people believed me to be.

  That was another thing Kieran complained about.

  I opened my eyes. Tiredness. The cases, the prejudice were wearing me down.

  That’s all it was. Not the first vicious glimmerings of R.R.S..

  His smile was soft. “Get a couple hours rest, go through his things in the morning.”

  “I need to do this now, to keep the continuity, so I don’t make mistakes.”

  “You already made one. You told that cop the lights were off in Truedell’s suite. But they were on when Granville opened the door. Don’t you remember? You didn’t even give me your usual warning not to touch the lightpads. Because the lights in the rooms were already on.”

  The lights had been on. That meant Truedell had seen his murderer. But I couldn’t see what Truedell had.

  My throat tightened. Something cold churned in my stomach. I shoved myself out of the plush luxury of the silk couch, away from the comforting warmth of Kieran’s touch. Because underneath that comfort lay his concern, which suddenly felt smothering.

  Stop being your job, he’d said for the past ten months. Start being just you.

  Other emotions railed at me. The cop on duty in the hallway outside the suite didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be guarding a crime scene with a P.I. on site. A mind fucker. A death stalker. A corpse cop.

  I wanted nothing more than to go back to Nidus Point, to the vast, verdant acreage surrounding Kieran’s house and feel only the small life essences of the birds, the flittermoths, the treecats and the foxes.

  But I couldn’t let myself. I had a case to solve. Maybe my last.

  I ignored Kieran’s soft encouragements, fled into the suite’s bedroom. The lights were on. But the forensic tech had been in there. He might have turned on the lights. Perhaps the darkness I saw through Truedell’s eyes had been the darkness of the bedroom. Most people slept with the lights off.

  An expensive linen shirt was draped over the back of a padded chair. I touched it, let myself fall into the E.I.I.s even though they had to have happened before Truedell was killed. But I needed to keep working, needed someone else’s problems. Not
my own.

  ~~

  “Bets, please. Place your bets.”

  The woman’s voice was clear, lilting, with a slight accent I hadn’t heard in a long time. It drew me in as I waited on the fringe of the crowd clustered thickly around the hazard table. I didn’t want to play, had no interest in betting anymore. Especially when players had to be at least five deep around the table. Yes, there’s anonymity in a crowd but there are also watchers. Dionosio taught me that as well.

  The crowd shouted across the table in a cacophony of voices. Old, young, nasal, mellow, male, female. A cocktail waitress brushed against me, champagne bubbles pattering against my skin, her voice almost girlish. “Sorry, sir. Busy here tonight.”

  It was. Yes, it was.

  ~~

  It was also blank, dark. I knew casinos weren’t. Another chill wracked through me. An omen of things to come? Is this what insanity would be like, an endless emptiness?

  “Jynx.” Kieran’s large hand brushed my hair out of my face. His gray eyes were storm colored. It had already rained on my cheeks. “You’re crying.”

  “Not really.” I dragged the sleeve of Truedell’s shirt across my eyes.

  “I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “Interesting choice of verb.” I jerked away from his fingers on my face. From his sympathetic tone that said everything would be all right. Everything would not be all right. I was failing, losing what I was. The only thing I knew how to be.

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “Actually, I am. Seen. Past tense of the verb to see. That’s what I can’t do, Kier. I can’t see anymore.”

  His hands cupped my face, brought it up to his. Worry, compassion tumbled through me along with a long list of doctors who would jump at the chance to be a Risardas’ personal physician. Doctors who could cure everything but the common cold and R.R.S..

  I shook my head. “Not like that. It’s the images I can’t see. Not you, or this room.” I crumpled Truedell’s shirt in my hand then tossed it angrily towards the bed. “He was in the casinos earlier. But I can’t even tell you which one.”

  “The images have faded already?”