Down These Strange Streets

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  With that, I realized that I was holding the neck of my beer bottle so hard my fingers were going numb. I was mad, madder than I’d been in a lot of years. If the feds could’ve stopped this and didn’t—if the feds sat back while Elizabeth Savoy went onto some Salaphobe’s dirty little list . . .

  I put down the bottle and handed my client a box of the takeaway and a pair of chopsticks. “Eat,” I ordered, and sat down to do the same.

  When we had both slowed down a little, I said, “Okay. Tell me again how you know the people on Harry’s list.”

  “As I said, I only know Eileen and Harry. Two of the others, Imogen and Barbara, I went to college with, although I haven’t seen them for years. And now I think about it, the guy named Hal Andrews? Imogen dated a guy named Hal for a while, and his name might have been Andrews, although I’m not sure. And the guy named Benny? Well, I vaguely remember Harry mentioning someone with that name from when he lived in L.A. The others don’t ring any bells.”

  “You kept in touch with people from college, but didn’t see them?”

  “Oh, we lost track of each other a long time ago, but then they joined Harry’s group on WeWeb, and we reconnected.”

  “Tell me about Harry’s WeWeb group.”

  “If you’re thinking that some hate group is targeting us through that, I don’t think so. Harry was—is—very careful. Anyone who applies for membership has to wait until they have a face-to-face meeting. He has to be sure. No, it would be really tough to crash that party.”

  I pinched up a few more bites of cold kung pao beef, reflecting that, no, crashing a party wasn’t precisely what I had in mind.

  I could feel in my pocket the two printouts I’d removed from Harry’s envelope before handing it to his sister.

  They were both page captures from the social networking site WeWeb. One of those belonged to Eileen Jacobs and followed a discussion about a movie she’d been working on, doing set design. The other belonged to a guy named Bill Mayer, who posted mostly about a kids’ baseball team that I guessed he coached.

  But the reason I’d taken them out of the envelope before handing it to my client, and the reason I thought they were in Harry’s secret collection to begin with, was not the brief chats the two WeWeb members had posted. It was the advertisements in the two sidebars. The first one, from Bill Mayer’s page dated the previous fall, read:

  SALAMAN? $500 AN HOUR FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION IN A STUDY. EASY, QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE, YOU CAN HELP OTHERS AND EARN HARD CASH FAST.

  The ad ended with a linked contact address. The second page, taken from Eileen’s page two months ago, had the same wording except for one thing.

  The payment offered had gone up tenfold, to $5,000.

  I FED MY CLIENT ANOTHER BEER, THEN THE CHOCOLATE. BEFORE LONG HER eyelids drooped into the relief of sleep. I pulled the covers over her, dropped the empty boxes into the wastebasket, and stretched out on the adjacent bed.

  “Thank you, Mike,” she said, her voice drowsy.

  “Sure, honey. Hey, tell me something?”

  “Hmm?”

  “How’d you find me? When you came to my office?”

  “Saw you in a bar, about six months ago. Someone I was with pointed you out, said you were a private investigator. One look, and I knew.”

  “Took you all that time to come up with an excuse to hire me, huh?”

  “Hmm,” she mumbled, and a minute later she was snoring into her pillow.

  The kiss she’d given me had nothing to do with romance. I knew that. Still, I couldn’t help the memory of it on my mouth as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, six chaste feet away from her.

  THE NEXT DAY, MY FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS WAS TO STASH MY CLIENT someplace safe. It took me twenty minutes driving in circles before I found that endangered species, a pay phone, but once I’d made a call, it was only a matter of a few hours before one of the two guys I’d trust with my life showed up and took her away. She didn’t want to go, but in the end, she did.

  Step two, a public computer.

  I’m a big fan of libraries: information, comfort, and safety, all in one place. And over the years, library associations have fought hard for privacy rights, which makes them more secure from snoops than any cyber café. This library even had a coffee bar attached to it, which was good because what I was doing wasn’t going to be quick.

  But before the place shut down that night, a targeted ad had popped up on the side of the shiny new WeWeb page for my made-up SalaMan, Julio Rogers. Julio was new to WeWeb for undisclosed but hinted-at reasons (“I been away, if you know what I mean . . .”) and had lousy writing skills, some ill-disguised anger, and a considerable interest in SalaMan rights.

  The targeting algorithm had caught Julio’s SalaMan references and sent him an offer for QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE cash.

  Julio’s offer had gone up to $7,500. Which could mean they had come into serious funding, or that they were getting desperate. Either way was fine with me. It was fine, too, with Julio, who shot off an e-mail to the address.

  I slept in a different motel that night, and had a dream about blue eyes.

  The next morning I went to another library, logged on to Julio’s page, and sat back with a smile on my face.

  Thank you for your interest in SalaMan Research Enterprises (SRE). If you hold SalaMan heritage, welcome! Our researchers are affiliated with the University of California, Stanford, Yale, and other medical schools, and are thoroughly trained in the protection of privacy rights. Our project is aimed at helping the particular health needs of the SalaMan community, and in the preliminary stages requires only a fifteen-minute questionnaire and a simple blood test. If you are interested in hearing about our work and how you can help us, we have public meetings across the country, for which you will be paid to attend, without making a commitment to participate further.

  (PLEASE NOTE: Applicants’ DNA will be tested immediately on arrival, before any payment is made. False applicants will be reported to WeWeb.)

  The form e-mail was signed by a man with a lot of letters sprinkled after his name, and the list of public meetings included—surprise, surprise—one at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, the day after tomorrow, at a big conference hotel less than thirty miles from the library Julio had been working at.

  Julio sent his acceptance of the offer, then logged off and left that library in a hurry, never to return.

  I spent the rest of that day and most of Friday moving from one library to another, putting on a lot of miles between each one, as I tried to duplicate Harry’s research about the people whose names ended up in his envelope.

  Saturday afternoon I was at the conference hotel, looking forward to that SRE information meeting, wondering whether they intended to pull a gun first, or just go with the tranquilizers.

  I HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO GET A CAMERA INSIDE THE MEETING ROOM ITSELF, but the one I’d tucked behind the hallway flower arrangement worked fine. At half past one on Saturday, three men came down the hallway, their faces nice and clear in the camera, their heights marked by a tick I’d put in a picture frame on the wall. Two of them were clearly muscle, one a boss type. One of the big guys carried a notice board with a tripod, which he set up facing the other way, although I’d seen when he was moving around that it was the sort of corporate intro you’d expect to see when you came toward a public meeting room. The other big guy was carrying a carton, no doubt filled with the kind of meaningless forms and equipment that would reassure a sucker and get him inside the doors.

  That day’s only sucker, it would appear, was Julio. Whose last act on this earth was to send an e-mail at 2:04 to say that he was sorry, he’d changed his mind, maybe in the future . . .

  At 2:12, the three men came out, looking considerably less friendly than they had going in. One carried the carton, now jammed every which way with stuff. They walked away from my viewpoint, and then the boss man jerked his thumb back and the other big guy whirled around and went back for the tripod sign.
If I’d been standing behind the flowers instead of my camera, he’d have smashed the sign over my head.

  At 2:14, the three men came out of the hotel’s side doors, dumped their armloads into the trunk of a shiny black car, and drove away. I hit the send button on the laptop I’d been watching all this on, tossed it onto the passenger seat, and put my own car into gear.

  Interesting fact: Cops pay attention when you send them traceable evidence of what you claim is a crime in progress. Phone calls can be about anything, post office letters can disappear, but when you tell them you’re sending them an electronic file, and then you send it, that makes a trail they hesitate to ignore entirely.

  The e-mail with the video attachment was to Frank, my cop . . . well, maybe not friend, but we’d worked together a couple times, and drunk together a few more times. I liked Frank fine, and I knew he was honest, but I also wanted a little insurance. No cop wants to go into a courtroom against a lawyer who has evidence of a murder the police could have prevented.

  Mine, for example.

  I followed, keeping well back thanks to the little blip on the GPS screen. While they were waiting for Julio, I’d had plenty of time to press a bug under the fender. Ain’t technology great?

  But not so great when the people you’re following change cars, and leave your clever blip standing at the same point until the transmitter’s battery runs down. Which was what I thought was happening when they went five miles and pulled into a coffeehouse.

  But I lucked out. The two goons did take their equipment from the trunk and got into a second car, but my shiny black target pulled immediately out of the parking lot, signaled for a right, and in two minutes was on the freeway north.

  After two hours, we’d left the freeway far behind, traffic on the smaller road was so thin I didn’t dare come closer than half a mile, and it looked like the guy was planning to drive up the backside of Nevada without even a coffee break. I, on the other hand, was yawning fit to break my jaw, my bladder had gone past uncomfortable to the brink of needing attention, and the pink blip on my screen had hypnotized me into stupidity.

  I only noticed it had stopped moving when I was already too close to do anything but barrel on by.

  The driver—still wearing both the jacket and tie—was just getting back into the car after unlocking a gate at the side of the road. He glanced at me, seeing only a dusty car whose bored driver was rubbing his eye. In the rearview mirror I saw him pull ahead into the side road, then get out to go back and close the gate. My foot didn’t move on the pedal until he had disappeared around a curve, at which time I swerved to the side and killed the engine.

  I grabbed the knapsack from the seat and forced my stiff legs and screaming bladder up the nearby rise until the dust plume from the once-shiny car came into view. I kept a naked eye on it for a couple of minutes and then, when my hands were free and my bladder happy, I took a pair of binoculars from the knapsack. Just in time to see the car vanish behind some low hills.

  This far from civilization, I did not expect to find a connection, and I was right. However, I wrote an e-mail on the laptop, hit send, then closed its lid and locked the thing in the trunk. If I failed to make it back, someone would eventually find it, and when it was fired up, Frank would learn where I had last been.

  I pushed some things I thought I might need into the knapsack, then walked across the road in the direction of the black car.

  FOR A DIRT ROAD IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, IT HAD A SURPRISING amount of traffic. By the time darkness fell, I had seen three vehicles go past: a white van, delivering some cartons and full grocery sacks, then leaving; a small red Jeep, driven at speed by a thin man with white hair; and an hour later, at dusk, the black car on its way out.

  Their goal was a wide, single-story building made of poured concrete with a faded blue steel roof. The only windows were on either side of the front door, although when I circled the place, I found two other doors, one on the back and the other on the western side. All three doors were steel, and solid looking. I wouldn’t know if their locks were as good until I got my hands on them.

  The two windows were covered from within, by slatted blinds on the left and curtains on the right. The blinds went dark about ten o’clock; the curtains snapped out of sight around half past eleven.

  At one in the morning, I slipped out from the trees facing the western door. I couldn’t see any security cameras, and although the light over the door was on, a quick poke with a branch changed that.

  It took me a while, even with my illegal-to-own, cutting-edge cracksman tool. When the lock finally gave, I vowed to write the guy who’d invented the thing a personal letter of thanks.

  I took out my gun and moved forward. Before I was fully inside, I knew: there were SalaMen inside. The air was damp, and carried on it the stink of fear and suffering.

  I let the door whisper shut and went in search of them. Went in search of—okay, damn it—of my people.

  Hellbender isn’t a salamander that spends its life underground, so its eyes aren’t as sensitive as some. Still, I had no trouble making out the shapes of the hallway and the doors, some of which were standing open. And I wasn’t too surprised to find one leading to stairs, since I’d figured there might be as much of this building underground as there was above.

  It wasn’t a new building, although sometime in the last year or so the walls got a coat of paint and the linoleum was scrubbed. I couldn’t tell what the place had been in a previous life—out here, it probably wasn’t anything legal.

  It wasn’t now, either. That ad in WeWeb promised easy money, but what the SalaMen who answered it got wasn’t money, and there was nothing easy about it. My recent library crawl, hunting down Harry’s names, had given me some things they had in common beyond their genetic structure.

  For one thing, an awful lot of them were strapped for cash. A couple had lost their jobs, others had mortgage problems or a divorce or kids to support (adopted kids, but still family). And as near as I could tell without going into Harry’s home computer, they’d all belonged to Harry’s WeWeb group. Every one of them was on WeWeb—which meant nothing in itself, most of the country was on WeWeb—but every one of Harry’s names had a page where portions were blocked from view.

  If his sister was right, it would be tough to infiltrate the group. However, I had no doubt that a clever and patient person could come up with an ad targeting customers of a brand of lotion soothing to SalaMan skin, or supporters of certain political candidates, or any of a hundred other possible arrows and send them the ad.

  And when the poor bastards responded to it, they’d ended up here.

  A research facility.

  At the bottom of a flight of metal stairs was a door. It was closed, although the stink that came around it made my eyes water. I took a deep breath and went through it.

  Another long corridor, with steel doors on both sides. Every door had a small barred window in it. Eyes glistened from behind some of the bars.

  I took care of the camera above the door, then eased forward to the first door and breathed, “Are there any guards down here?”

  “Who . . . who are you?” A man’s voice, hesitant.

  “Answer me!”

  “Guards? No, but there’s a camer—”

  “Where are the keys?”

  “Keys?” He was either confused or frightened by the question. It occurred to me that his captors might have played games with him, and he was afraid this might be one of them. But I didn’t have time to pat his head.

  “I came to get you all out of here, but you’ve got to help. Harry’s sister sent me,” I tried.

  “Lizzie?”

  I might as well have said Jesus and the Virgin Mary for all his astonishment. “The keys, man!”

  “One key for all, on a ring near the door,” he shot back.

  I leaped for the door, found the simple key, and stabbed it into his door. I thought I might have to drag him out, but he came willingly enough. I shoved the key
at him. “Let the others out,” I started to say, but the key fell to the floor. I snatched it up, cursing his clumsiness. Then he held up his hands for me to look at.

  His hands looked strange in the dim light, more like stubs. And in growing horror I saw that they were stubs. He had no fingers. No fingers at all.

  “Regeneration experiment,” he said, in a voice so tight, it didn’t sound human.

  My skin suddenly felt a size too small. I swallowed, and turned to open the next door.

  There were eleven prisoners in that cellar. All of them were missing something. One woman had fingers about an inch long; God knows how many months she’d been down there. Another woman had a face that even in the near dark I could see was beautiful, but for her ruined eyes—

  A thin man whose beard was either blond or gray shoved past me to embrace the blind woman, who jerked away and then cried “Bill!” and flung herself at him.

  “Quiet!” I ordered, and to Bill I whispered, “Take her over to the door, we’ll all go up at once.”

  I got the last two cages open, but one of the prisoners did not emerge. When I stepped in, I could see why.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, torn between abandoning a person who was going to slow us down dangerously, and the impossibility of leaving anyone in this terrible place. But eventually I became aware of someone standing next to me. It was the first man I’d freed.

  I said, “You’re Harry?”

  “That’s right. You?”

  “Mike Heller. Your sister hired me. Did you find your girl here? Eileen?”

  “She died.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry.”

  “Before I got here. Do you want me to carry her?” he asked, gesturing at the girl on the cot.

  “Can you?”

  “I’ll sure as hell try.”

  He’d been down here only a couple of weeks, which gave him a lot more reserves than some of the others. I helped lift her onto his back, and although he let out a sound when his hand brushed her knee, he clamped his arms against her legs and turned to the door.