Latency

by Blaze Ward

  There was a large, ceramic pot of tea, with Chinese characters telling some story around the outside. Greyson didn’t read the language, and didn’t feel like snapping enough pictures for a translator program to handle the process for him.

  Laux was dressed for church or something. A much nicer suit than he’d worn either time before. Just dark enough to be serious and sober, but it was still burgundy. The white silk shirt and cherry red silk tie should have looked gauche, but somehow made him look professorial.

  Greyson could never pull off that look without feeling silly. Rachel might have the chops.

  “Greetings, my interesting associates,” Laux saluted them with his own mug as they entered.

  And his smile was irrepressible, a glow of white teeth against his dark brown skin.

  Greyson nodded and fixed two mugs of tea.

  Laux had taken the brown chair, so Greyson sat on the farther end of the couch, nodding at Rachel to sit between them.

  “And how may I provide assistance, Detectives?” Laux grinned at them.

  “I’d like to leave the rental car here for a day,” Greyson said simply. “And pay you a reasonable bribe to make sure that nothing happens to it until I could return.”

  “Reasonable?” the man perked up. “What’s reasonable look like, Leigh?”

  “I think we’re about to blow the case wide open, Laux,” he replied, sipping at a particularly good pu’er tea that was just at the right amount of chewy. “Three quarters of it, anyway. That last quarter remains complicated.”

  “How so?” Laux sat up sharply.

  “From here, I’m going to have someone arrested, and then sweated,” Greyson said in a cold, deadly voice. “I don’t think he’ll give me the address where that chip was made. I also don’t think that the other officers working this case will be able to track it either.”

  “Where do I come in?” Laux asked.

  “If we pull this off, they’ll probably give us carte blanche to solve the rest,” Greyson said, nodding to Rachel. “I’d like to bring you in as a special consultant in an official capacity of some sort, so you have hands-on with that chip.”

  Greyson figured it was like dangling a bottle in front of a recovering alcoholic, but he also didn’t figure the man would object.

  “And in trade?” Laux asked a little breathless.

  “The car has some of the evidence I need to take my subject down, but none of it is actually related to solving this case,” Greyson hedged. “He might want to cut a deal when he loses all that. About all he’ll have left is the chip, so either he tells me how he did it and I get to tell you, or he doesn’t and you try your luck at it.”

  Laux had stopped breathing. Greyson almost smiled at that, but he was too tired. Too angry. Too something.

  He’d had to deal with Zielinski being a shit for too many years. Then sending assassins after him.

  Greyson Leigh was feeling a little ugly right now.

  “Why me?” Laux finally asked, having worked his way through a complicated decision tree of alternatives.

  “You have all upside,” Greyson said. “You play straight with me here and maybe I make you rich. Maybe just give you a one- to two-year head start on your competitors. Other folks are less trustworthy right now because the evidence I do have is going to ruin a few lives if it comes out.”

  “That makes us targets for more assassins,” Rachel helpfully pointed out, causing Laux’s eyes to get a little big.

  But he also seemed to get the message that the car was a bomb. Maybe an armored SUV parked in a secret garage, waiting for someone to come along and use it.

  After all, if that one man had stayed put in his bunker, he’d have probably been able to hold off those Federales for far longer than they wanted to dance.

  But Greyson had been a hunter then, too. When it involved finding the right game trail and waiting for your prey.

  Quinton Laux didn’t have that look in his eyes. That one that said he’d be a problem. Part of it was a fear of what sorts of assassins someone might send after cops who had already successfully killed the first one.

  Greyson assumed they’d use a bomb next time, if Zielinski had a chance to take a second shot at him.

  Which was why Greyson Leigh was going to drop a whole ton of bricks on the man all at once.

  “How long?” Laux finally asked.

  “Twenty-four hours, at most,” Greyson reassured him. “After that, someone will come back for it and we’ll set up a password or something so you don’t end up calling the cops if it is anybody but Rachel or me.”

  Laux took a longer sip of his tea. Chewed on it for a long moment as he worked his way through whatever stages of death matrix he had in his head, offsetting a little possible advantage now against a possible favor from a grateful Leigh later.

  Didn’t take him any longer than Greyson was expecting.

  “I believe I can handle my responsibilities,” the man said, holding out a hand for Greyson to shake. “Now what?”

  Greyson leaned back and let the heat of the tea start to fill in some of that cold hollowness in his chest.

  This had been the easiest part.

  Now he just had to deal with Edgar Redhawk.

  And Olek Zielinski.

  Then finally Denise Upkins.

  29

  The Dance

  Rachel watched her partner transfer everything he’d just bought at the grocery store out of the bag he had grabbed out of the car and into various pockets. Bottle of kombucha. Beef jerky. Stamps. Cheap lighter. Bag of trail mix. Today’s newspaper. A thing of manila envelopes.

  Mundane shit. Except for the suggestion that Greyson was maybe going to be mailing something to someone. Or several someones.

  Given the contents of some of those files, she was a little hesitant to ask. There would be no good answers.

  Lives were set to be utterly destroyed, but she still didn’t know which way Greyson Leigh was going to jump, and that frightened her.

  He was still acting like he was clinically depressed. Going out in a blaze of glory, as it were, taking everyone and everything down with him.

  If it was Greyson.

  Had the Phrenic somehow gotten control of their body again? Was that possible? Nothing anyone had ever said or written down on the species to talk about a Deathwalker had any useful details, except that they came apart in a few days.

  But they were supposed to revert to base form when that happened, because the human didn’t know how to control the body. Greyson seemed physically in charge. Emotionally he was in a different place.

  A man with no fucks left to give.

  She wondered if she should have ended up grabbing a page or two from the chicken fried steak box before they left everything behind. Rachel from a year ago, before Greyson Leigh, probably would have.

  But she’d been partnered with Carlos Dominguez then, and that man was so bent he had to screw his pants on in the morning, it seemed.

  Rachel Asher realized that she wanted to be an honest cop. One of the few that a man like Leigh would respect. If poverty was the cost, relative to men like Zielinski or Dominguez, that was acceptable.

  After all, Zielinski had been living like a bum in a walk up, even when he had enough money in the freezer to buy the property he’d been living on and probably every other one within a couple of kilometers.

  But he’d been a cheap man anyway. She remember that much. Bad suits. Sandwiches he brought from home instead of lunch out. Little things.

  The rain around them had held off a little. Or maybe passed. Hard to tell. The skies were low and a darker gray promising pain later. The wind was a fierce hawk coming at them from the northwest as they started down the street.

  “Call Redhawk now, if you want clothes,” Greyson reminded her as they navigated that crowd of civilians possibly sneaking out early from a regular job to have a drink at a bar or something.

  She didn’t understand how office drones lived and kept their sanity, bu
t she’d wanted to be a cop since she’d first written it in her diary at eight.

  Rachel still had that diary, stored in a box at her parent’s house.

  She pulled out her comm and let it finally talk to the network again. Machine took a little while, possibly just being pissy, and then downloaded all the messages and missed calls she’d been avoiding for the last eighteen hours.

  She dialed and Redhawk answered immediately.

  “You two finally coming in?” he asked in a friendly-enough tone.

  “Yup,” Rachel replied simply. “Headed to Greyson’s place so he can change and take a shower. Wondering if you had anybody that might swing by my apartment and get me a change of clothes, to save us a second trip?”

  “Already have an overnight bag packed for both of you,” he laughed. “Wasn’t sure which place to break into, so I did both of them. Down the street from Greyson’s in his favorite coffee shop right now. What’s your ETA?”

  “Hang on,” she said, pulling the machine down so she could check bus schedules. “Maybe thirty minutes, including walking and wait time for the bus.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Looking forward to hearing all about it.”

  And then he hung up.

  She stared at her comm for a long second, muttered a profanity under her breath, and stuffed it into a pocket.

  “And?” Greyson asked.

  “He was that far ahead of us both already,” she said.

  “No,” Greyson said. “I made sure that it was obvious what we were doing, so he wasn’t paying that close attention to all the other things we were doing.”

  Rachel shivered at his voice. Death might be jealous of that tone.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now we go dance with the devil,” Greyson replied.

  30

  Edgar

  Part of how Greyson stayed in shape involved walking up and down the stairs, everywhere he went. He remembered stories about men like the old actor Kirk Douglas, who had done the same, and lived to be over one hundred, at a time when his life expectancy at birth had been about sixty.

  Greyson liked the thought of a five decade bonus. Whether he used it to keep stomping on bad guys or took up some other hobby would remain to be seen.

  So he walked up to his apartment instead of taking the lift. He’d already spotted at least one car down the street that was probably a couple of plain-clothes thinking they were invisible. He expected a few more.

  That was why he’d hidden the rental.

  Just because, he treated his door like it was fully locked and patiently undid all five before he opened it. Five was an unnecessary number, but he had felt like being an unnecessary person when he did it.

  Not even a police ram would get through it, after what he’d done to the frame.

  He smiled and pushed the door in, letting it swing all the way back to bang into the stopper and bounce off.

  No carpet in here, just raw concrete floors that had been polished with a diamond wheel until they looked like marble. Rugs of various sizes instead.

  The Murphy bed folded up against the wall, like he’d left it, with the table under it flipped down for Greyson to sit and read the news while drinking his coffee.

  He looked at the faded mustard of the walls, almost a yellowed egg-shell, and decided that maybe Emmy was right and he needed something else. She’d suggested salmon, but Greyson hadn’t been prepared to take that sort of a step.

  Maybe he was now.

  Couch and one chair in the middle, facing the windows that took up most of that wall. The one bookcase with all the things he hadn’t been willing to hand to Liz to sell yet, but that was down from six such shelves two years ago.

  Nobody needed physical books anymore. You could call up the entire collected wit and wisdom of the human race on your comm for a cheap price these days.

  Greyson was just enough old-fashioned that he liked the smell of a book when he opened it. Wood pulp. Ink. Glue.

  He’d spent way too much time in the county library as a kid. That smell always took him back to a simpler, happier place.

  Redhawk was in the chair. Probably because it faced the door so he wouldn’t leave much trace of his passage in here. Nobody else was with him.

  That was good. Greyson had contained the niggling fear that Denise would be here. He needed his ducks in a row, not pretending to be drunk squirrels at a rave.

  Redhawk first. Then Zielinski.

  Then maybe Denise? Maybe not?

  Too soon to tell.

  Greyson stripped off his jacket and carried it to the cleaning bag. It didn’t have a funk yet, but it would get there if he wore it for much longer.

  Rachel would know that smell. He had no idea if Redhawk would, as well.

  Not a test he wished to administer today.

  “I need a shower,” Greyson announced, pulling things from his pockets and unhooking the two holsters.

  Redhawk nodded silently. He had a bag next to him that presumably had spare clothes for Rachel. Greyson wondered if he’d be able to tell from his closet what Redhawk had pulled out, and if he had returned it.

  Greyson wanted to say he didn’t care, but he’d be lying. He just had no fucks left to give, and that wasn’t the same thing.

  He just grabbed things from the dresser as he went by, stopping at the closet and pulling out a clean suit to wear.

  The nicer one.

  Not the one he would wear to take Emmy to the opera, or a museum, but maybe a nice dinner date uptown where the staff knew her by name because she entertained clients and business partners there regularly.

  Greyson headed to the bathroom and closed the door behind him.

  He needed a little time entirely vacant of people.

  Greyson emerged thirty minutes later clean and shaved. Dressed to the sevens maybe, instead of the nines. Better than Zielinski deserved, but he wasn’t doing this for that shitbird.

  This was all a performance, and he was playing a character. Hopefully not Shakespeare, because as near as he could tell, everyone died when the Bard of Avon got rolling.

  Maybe the fates would settle for him being Horatio? If this was Hamlet, and you could kind of squint and see that, it worked. Everyone important had died by the end of Hamlet. Mostly badly, too.

  Only Horatio had emerged with mind and body intact. Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, slapstick duo that they’d been turned into much later, got the shaft.

  Yeah, Horatio. He could work with that.

  Rachel walked right by him into the bathroom and closed the door, Redhawk’s bag in hand. He smiled at her, refreshed even enough to spend the evening with these people.

  Greyson went to the kitchen and started assembling everything back into pockets. The snacks went into the outside pockets of the jacket. The envelope and stamps stayed on the table.

  Both holsters.

  Rather than start that conversation, he began the labor of making coffee. Water from the tap into the electric kettle. Hand-press from the drying rack where it lived most of the time. Filter from the cabinet shelf next to the honey. Beans from the freezer.

  Greyson had learned a long time ago that roasted coffee beans that are frozen lasted a lot longer than sitting on the shelf. He generally went through them too fast for age to set in, but the Army had pounded some things bone deep. Their willingness to serve shitty coffee was close to the top.

  Coconut cream from the refrigerator door. He wasn’t a vegan or anything. Had just gotten hooked on the stuff during a—…let’s call it a business trip to a place in southeast Asia where a young white boy like him had had no business being. And not everyone could digest cow’s milk.

  Water on to boil. Beans into the hand-cranked grinder, because he liked a fairly coarse result, and electric ones reduced them to powder.

  Greyson assembled the hand press and pulled a mug from the bottom shelf of the closest cabinet. Beans got ground and dropped into the top of the hand press.

  Someti
mes, he would put things into the mug directly, so they could dissolve when the hot water arrived. Collagen for joints. Maybe matcha tea powder. Whatever his body craved.

  Right now, he wanted caffeine and heat.

  Redhawk had stirred and risen. Greyson marked his approach by sound, smell, and the heat the man gave off, but maybe he was wound a little too tight right now.

  “That almost looked like meditation in motion,” Redhawk offered in a friendly voice.

  “Tried Tai Chi Chuan once, but I didn’t want to learn Mandarin,” Greyson glanced back.

  The water was hot enough, so he unplugged the kettle and poured the water over the grounds, stirring with his other hand as the slurry turned brown. Bubbles let him know that everything was still fresh.

  Today, he was having a four. The press was filled almost to the top, just so the water would be the darkest and chewiest.

  Redhawk was holding a to-go cup from the place down on the corner, but Greyson wouldn’t have offered to share his expensive beans with the man anyway.

  They were unindicted co-conspirators, not comrades.

  He stirred until the water drained down to about the two level. Washed the stirrer and grab the plunger. Pressed the water the rest of the way through the grounds, then dumped grounds into the composting bin for the old lady on six who liked to grow blueberries and roses in pots, and used the grounds for her soil.

  Add honey and stir to dissolve, listening to the sounds of the building. Rachel in the shower. Redhawk dead silent except for the occasional sip of coffee. Traffic down below on the street as people were headed home from a normal day of work, unaware of the dark things swirling around them.

  If Greyson was doing his job, they would never have to know.

  Half cup of coconut milk, because he figured he’d need the fat later to keep him going.

  It was going to be a long, ugly night.

  Both men returned to the living space when he was done, Redhawk in the chair, Greyson on the couch. The shower stopped. They waited in companionable silence.