by Matt Doyle
“I ain’t running, but I ain’t telling the cops anything either. If that thing’s been recording,” he says, nodding weakly towards Bert, “then that’s all you’re getting outta me.”
I grab him by the vest top and haul him across the room until he’s sitting against the kitchen counter. I couldn’t do it off my own back, but he’s being compliant despite his refusal to talk, and so he kinda threw himself across the room for me. He probably just doesn’t want to get hit again.
I nod back over my shoulder in the direction of the dead body by the doorway. “You see your buddy there? If you don’t talk, Bert’s gonna keep you alive, but make you look worse than that.” I turn to Bert and add, “Slowly.”
“Caw,” Bert replies.
I don’t wait for a response from Paloma. I just walk calmly towards the bedroom, kicking the discarded gun over towards Bert as I go. There’s broken glass everywhere. That’s gonna be a nightmare to get off the bed. It’s not as bad as the blood soaking into the floor out in the office, though. Still, I can’t complain too much. He would have headed back here the second he got the automatic signal that the door security had been compromised, so he made pretty good time. But I do wonder why he always goes for windows.
I reach under the pillow and pull out my Glock Vintage. It’s designed to look and handle like the classic Glock 23, but with all the expected modern conveniences that come with firearms these days; it’s got a lightweight but tough shell, should be impossible to jam, and it’s set to incorporate multiple different bullet tips. A lot of people in the underground use “quarters”, a nasty little flat point with a sharp, cross-shaped tip at the end. I prefer the older style, modified round-pointed .40 Smith and Wesson rounds, just like the FBI and IRS use. In part that’s because I do like the cliché PI look. If people look at you and their inbuilt imaging kicks in, they’ll start to treat you according to what they’ve seen on TV. All that means is they’ll be more likely to miss it when you start doing things differently from what they expect, ’cause in their mind you can’t possibly act any other way. That’s a useful trick to have in your arsenal if you’re up against the right sort of people. Mostly, though, I use these bullets ’cause, if given the choice, I’d pick the “shoot first and ask questions later” approach over the “shoot first and wish that you could still ask questions” effect that the newer style rounds tend to have.
I check the magazine out of habit, but I already know that it’s full. Since acquiring Bert, I haven’t really needed to carry a gun with me anymore. With my shiny little friend staying behind, for now, going old-school seems sensible. Just ’cause some idiots who consider themselves killers don’t think Gary hired anyone else, doesn’t mean that he didn’t.
“Computer,” I say. “The police should be on their way here already after the explosion. Put a message through to Captain Hoover for me. Use bullet points as follows. One, explosion was at Caz’s office. Two, Paloma Brothers responsible. Three, one dead. Four, ask Bert. Five…Eddie Redwood was not murdered.”
“Understood,” the speakers reply.
I grab the side holster from the wardrobe and strap it to my belt while I walk back through the mess in the main room. Paloma Number Two is being very quiet now, and is keeping his attention on Bert, who has taken up residence on the chest of Paloma Number One. I make a point of not staring at Bert’s handiwork, instead walking slowly out the door with my gaze dead ahead. I run the moment I hit the hall.
Twenty-Five
I SPRINT THE two blocks to Morton Heights and make a beeline for the elevator. My gun is clearly on display, so the complete lack of a security guard this time is a nice spot of luck for me. Once I’m in the elevator, I hit the button for floor three and finish completing the last of my warrants using the audio tool on my phone. I normally prefer to do this manually, if for no other reason than that it avoids people listening in, but speed is important right now. That it’ll need an upgrade to allow me to make an arrest is neither here or there. Once he sees what’s happened, Hoove will push it through, I’m sure.
Once I hit floor three, I run again, rounding corners until I can see the door to Gary’s apartment. “Screw knocking,” I grunt, and launch immediately into a series of hard kicks.
Crack. Crack. The middle lock snaps away from the frame, and I move my aim to the bottom end of the door. Crack. There goes the bottom lock. I step back, duck my head, and charge shoulder-first into the thankfully not reinforced door, ripping the last lock away as I barrel into the hallway. Slowing to a walk, I draw my Glock with one hand and hold my phone out with the other, the warrant clearly displayed on its screen.
“Mr. Locke!” I yell. “Mr. Locke!”
“There is no need to shout, M-Miss Tam,” he replies from somewhere in the open-plan room at the end of the hall. “I have been expecting you.”
I move carefully into the room and spot Gary Locke sitting casually in his log-in chair. Keeping my gun raised, I swing my body from side to side to check that no one else is tucked away in the back of the room, and once I’m satisfied that we’re alone, I hold out the phone towards Gary.
“Gary Locke. I have a warrant for your arrest, under the charge of conspiracy to murder. As far as I’m concerned, you can shove your rights up your ass.”
“Language, M-Miss Tam,” he wheezes, grinning like a guy who thinks he holds all the cards. “When th-the Paloma Brothers did not come back, I thought that you may drop by. I had not realised that they would use explosives. I had requested discretion.”
“Then you should have hired a pro,” I spit.
“Ah, but until Eddie’s will is read, my funds are limited.”
“That and you had to work quickly, right? The files I got from Hollister were infected with a copy of Eddie’s modified SnapDragon tool, weren’t they?”
Gary smiles arrogantly and nods.
“No wonder the damn thing was running so slow. What did it send you?”
“Copies of the files, and details of your searches.”
“Internal or external?”
“Both.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who can get inside information. One of the idiots you hired told me that you intend to kill Lori. Where is she?”
“Right now? I could not honestly say.”
I can hear the sirens in the distance now. There’s no way they’d have come here yet, which means that they’re just arriving at my block. Now I understand why he could hear the explosion; the walls are ridiculously thin. On the plus side, the recordings that Bert took here should be nice and clear. Something still feels wrong, though. Maybe it would be better to stall until Hoover and the boys come busting in. Or I could drag him outside and haul his ass back to my office to save them the bother.
Yeah, let’s do that.
Gary nods at a point over my shoulder, and I turn without thinking. A rock-solid fist connects with the side of my head. My legs go numb, and I drop to one knee, my phone flying out of my hand and crashing hard against the wall. On instinct, I tighten my grip on the Glock and try to raise it towards whoever hit me, but my vision is too blurry. A hand closes tightly around my fingers and twists, causing me to drop the gun, then slams into my chest, knocking me back.
“Did you bring her?” Gary asks, but he sounds miles away. The guy that hit me grunts, and a shadow moves across my line of sight, disappearing back towards the door. It reappears again shortly after, dragging something with it. The whole room looks like it’s spinning to the side, but keeps jolting back to the middle again whenever it gets close to the edge of my vision. My stomach lurches, and I throw myself forward, forcing my hands into the floor as hard as I can to keep myself from keeling over while I retch. Somewhere at the other end of the room, I can hear Gary laugh. The sound of his arrogant chuckling pounds against my head more than my own hacking and coughing right now. He’ll pay for that.
“Ah,” Gary sighs, and leans forward in his chair. The bigger shadow hands something to Gary, and he tips i
t up over the pile on the floor. It must be a glass or something. The lump coughs and jolts upright.
“What…where am…Gaz?” asks a familiar voice, and I realise what had felt wrong. The Palomas were going to help dispose of the body, not transport the living person to Gary’s apartment.
“Shit…” I grunt, and the Lori shadow turns towards me.
“Cassie?” She turns towards the big mass standing between us, then back to Gary and his chair. “I don’t understand…” My vision clears enough to see Lori slump, her head bowed. “So it was you,” she says, her voice a sad whisper. “You hired the guy that killed Eddie.”
“Me?” Gary laughs. “M-Miss Tam, did you finish looking at the bank statements that you procured from M-Mr. Hollister?”
“Yeah,” I say, the word burning in my throat.
“And did he p-pay Devin Carmichael to kill Eddie?”
“The money went from his account to Devin’s,” I reply. I can see straight now, but if I can keep my speech slow, I may be able to avoid taking another hit just yet. Letting my gaze flick to the side, I notice that the big guy responsible for grounding me is a hefty expressionless slab of suit and muscles. A hired bodyguard? No. Gary’s funds are low. He said that himself. Someone after the same thing that Gary is, maybe? There’s something vaguely familiar about the guy, but I can’t place it.
“So Hollister did it,” Lori says, her attention on me. She turns her head sharply towards Gary and tries to get her thoughts out, but she’s still groggy. That’ll be the combination of the shock of what’s happening and whatever the big guy used to subdue her. I can feel the swelling on my own face, but there are no physical marks on her, so I can be pretty sure that he didn’t hit her. “But how did you know…were you both…why?”
“Hollister didn’t know that he’d paid Devin,” I mumble. “Gary knew, but he wasn’t responsible for the money transfer either.”
“Then who?” Lori asks me, her voice pleading now.
“The IP address for the payment origin came up as belonging to 17 Cornick Crescent.”
Lori’s eyes go wide. “But that’s…”
“Eddie was a believer,” Gary says. “Some things he could see as useful to society, but extreme body modification?” He shakes his head, that predatory smile slipping comfortably over his face. “Tech Shifting, he said, was the beginning of the end of days. We were c-corrupting God’s creations and spawning our own abominations. When you spent y-your grandparents’ money on joining the flock of the fallen…” He pauses and smiles cruelly. “Well, that was more than he could handle. His dear s-sweet sister that he loved so much. Lost forever.”
Gary leans forward and wipes a tear from Lori’s cheek with a shaky finger, his other arm straining to hold the crutch in place and keep him upright. “You were already such a disappointment to him, what with your refusal to f-follow God’s teachings and find a n-nice husband to settle down with. Did you know that he spent his evenings praying for your salvation? He hoped that you would rejoin the flock one day. All you needed was to meet the right man, he used to say. When you chose to start Tech Shifting, it made him feel like he had failed. Failed as a b-big brother, and failed as a believer.”
“He wouldn’t…he never…” Lori whimpers.
“Wouldn’t he?” Gary laughs, forcing a coughing fit back down just as it begins. “Poor Eddie felt that he no longer deserved to see heaven, such were his failings, so he chose suicide as his punishment. In his eyes, his failure to keep you s-safe, Lori, cost him his soul.”
Lori is shaking, unable to even try to respond now. I step in, attempting to give her a chance to recover. “Then why do it like this?” I ask. “Why frame Hollister? Why not take his bullshit reasons and throw himself under a bus?”
“M-my father is a lawyer. He is close to M-Mr. Hollister and helps negotiate the deals for his products with the military. I too am a believer, M-Miss Tam. A believer in peace. Peace without the need for force. To learn that m-my father was involved with strengthening what is nothing more than a legalised band of thugs was a shock. I tried to convince him to stop taking jobs like that, but he refused. The money was too good, he said.” Gary lets out a short bitter laugh, and spits, “So I left home and never looked back. When Eddie told me about his troubles, I saw an opportunity.
“Religion is sometimes as destructive as our armed forces, but the true believers can be useful tools in the war for peace. I offered him an olive branch, you see. ‘Use your death to bring down the man responsible for y-your sister’s fall from grace,’ I told him. ‘It could be your salvation, your redemption. And maybe w-when Hollister is exposed for what he is, your d-dear Lori will see the error of her ways. Save her,’ I said. ‘Even if you can’t save yourself.’”
Gary turns back to the shivering Lori and smiles that awful smile again. “Your brother’s feelings were pure, and his beliefs heartfelt. That made him easy to manipulate. But do not misunderstand me. Eddie truly was a friend to me. For that reason, I wanted to see him find peace. I wanted to help him. And, if in doing so, I could cause one of the biggest contributors to army resources to fall, then all the better.”
“But it didn’t work,” Lori whispers, barely finding her voice. “The police thought that it was an overdose, not murder.”
I pick myself up into a sitting position but make sure to let myself slump back again, struggling to ignore the smell of the chunk-filled puddle in front of me. “That was the point, wasn’t it? You were banking on Lori chasing this. Once someone uncovered Devin Carmichael’s involvement, you knew that the police would be told to back off. This isn’t just about the army; you want to bring down the local PD too.”
“The police are as corrupt as any businessman,” the big guy replies. “They pick and choose who gets sent to jail and who gets to walk away. They deserve to have their secrets uncovered.”
Sounds like someone has a chip on their shoulder. Maybe he lost a friend or a relative to someone the PD couldn’t touch? He hasn’t lost my Glock, though. I can see it peeking out of the top of his trousers. I just need to find a way to get to it.
“So are you a contributor on The Roots of Eden are Rotten?” I ask.
“Yes,” Gary replies, his eyes glowing with pride.
I shake my head and try to make a wound. “You could proclaim Eddie’s death a murder, pin it on Hollister, and even blame police incompetence, but no one’s going to take it seriously if you post it on that blog. And the press? Anyone who does a little digging will see that the transaction took place in Eddie’s home. The only internet access he had was through his log-in chair, and that was locked to his retinal scan, so it’ll be pretty obvious that Hollister couldn’t have done it.”
“You underestimate us, M-Miss Tam. The headset will unlock automatically tomorrow. At the same time, Eddie’s program will destroy the meeting audio files and overwrite the transcripts. The changes will be subtle, but just enough to add to the guilt. That includes both his copies, and yours. After that, all of M-Mr. Hollister’s dirty little secrets will come out.”
“But that won’t work now. If you kill us, things will start pointing to you. If you don’t, then you know that we’ll tell everyone. Either way, you lose.” The wild look in Gary’s eyes catches my attention and I realise the mistake that I’ve made. “You never intended to get away with it, any of it, did you?”
Gary laughs, the sound catching in his throat and sending him into a coughing fit. He struggles to get himself under control, but eventually forces the last hacking cough out and relaxes back into his chair a little more.
“Of course not. Ah. Eddie, now he believed that we would. He was very confident in his work, you see, and deservedly so, but he didn’t stop to think about how M-Mr. Hollister would defend himself.”
“He already knew how to trace the program,” I reply, and give my head a wary shake, blurring my vision slightly. “He’d be able to prove that it existed, who created it, and what it was doing.”
“He knew ho
w to trace part of it, yes, but he would be able to find the rest easily enough. Then, he would need to grant an external body access to his systems in order to verify his claims.”
“But then they’d know what had been falsified,” Lori says. “Everything you’ve done would have been for nothing.”
“There’s no smoke without fire,” I say, glancing over to Lori. “Even if the files are proven to be edited, there are plenty of people who would believe Hollister did whatever Gary wants to pin on him, purely by virtue of the case coming to light. With Hollister’s standing in the business world, there’d be no way to prevent it going public.” I turn to Gary and add, “That’s not enough, though, is it? You think that he really is hiding something.”
“Oh, I know that he is,” Gary rasps.
“I don’t understand,” Lori replies.
“Any investigation would have to be pretty in-depth,” I say, keeping my attention on Gary. “They’ll go through the non-edited stuff to search for signs of tampering and to get a comparison for signs that other files have been tampered with. Every secret Hollister has will become known to the team assigned to the case.” Gary flashes his teeth, and I turn back to Lori. “Even if he’s not directly under investigation for wrongdoing, the moment the PD turn up anything untoward in Hollister’s systems, they’ll turn it into a double investigation. The key was giving them a chance to find the files themselves. If Gary just handed over a bunch of stuff that he’d stolen using the program, they’d simply arrest him for hacking without even checking the files.”
“But you’ll be sent down now too,” Lori says, giving Gary a look of pure shock. “You won’t be able to see it all through.”
“Even that has a purpose. What little I knew of M-Mr. Hollister’s crimes, I learned from listening in on m-my father’s telephone calls. His inadvertent breach of confidentiality, combined with the scandal of my actions, will ruin him and force him out of his immoral business.”
“You want to save him. Like Eddie wanted to save me?” Lori tries, and Gary shakes his head.
