Love on the Run

  I refrained from stating the smutty obvious and returned to the report. The Forensics team had found and captured a good many fingerprints from various locations in the apartment. Most could have been made at any time, not necessarily at the time of the murder, except for one set. They’d found four bloody fingerprints on the refrigerator door. The blood type matched the victim’s, but the prints, which were all from the same individual, did not. Someone who had Trotter’s blood on their hands had opened the fridge, taken out a piece of chocolate cake, and eaten most of it before leaving the remains on the kitchen counter.

  “God!” I said. “That’s horrible.”

  “Sociopathic,” Ari said. “And arrogant. You’d think they would have wiped the prints off. That’s hard evidence of presence if not of the murder itself. Whoever it is really doesn’t think she can be caught, which is another indication she’s sociopathic.”

  “I notice you say ‘she.’ I’m only guessing that Ash did the killing.”

  “I do need to remember that. But since world-walker Murphy identified her, and a member of her gang may well have been servicing Trotter, Ash is the best lead we have. Your brother doesn’t have very good taste in women, I must say. Werewolves. Sociopaths.”

  “Sophie is a perfectly nice girl except for once a month.”

  Ari started to grin, wiped it away, and set his lips tight together.

  “Don’t you dare say it,” I said.

  Ari’s survival instincts did their job. He cleared his throat, coughed once, and returned to studying his laptop screen.

  In the morning, we headed back out across the multiverse yet once again. I began to see Spare14’s point about living on the run.

  The California of Terra Three, or Interchange as I’d termed it before I learned the official naming system, qualifies as a hellhole—low tech, poverty-stricken, essentially Chaotic, though here and there one could find a few pockets of Order and decency. What makes it hell on its earth is the high radiation level. Huge clouds of yellow dust sweep through the atmosphere, scattering radioactivity wherever they drift. Birth defects and a short life expectancy keep the low population desperate.

  In this pinchbeck version of the Golden State, a San Francisco of sorts exists. SanFran, the inhabitants call it, a town rather than a city and one that lacks both bridges and charm. Gangs rule territories within it, and werewolves run the police force. If you are Catholic, you root for the Giants and join an Orange gang. If you’re Protestant, you root for the Sackamenna Dodgers and pledge your loyalty to Blue. You can guess that the beery fights at the ballpark have a certain intensity that they lack on more civilized world levels.

  It was no wonder, I thought, that the Axeman found plenty of customers in SanFran for his trans-world coyote scheme. It was also no wonder that I hated returning there. Since I had no choice in the matter, Ari and I dressed in jeans and shabby shirts so we’d fit in with the locals. He carried the Beretta, of course, somewhat hidden between a T-shirt and a loose denim work shirt, worn open. In SanFran, it pays to let everyone know you’re armed. We also brought a suitcase of necessary items with us down to Spare14’s office. Willa had already arrived and waited for us on a chair in the front room. She asked about the encumbering suitcase.

  “Professional clothes for Six,” Ari said. “There’s a gate in SanFran that leads there. After we’ve interviewed Wagner, we’d like to go through to join up with the TWIXT team there.”

  “If we can,” I put in.

  “Depends on that gate,” Willa said. “The one in Sutro Gardens?”

  “That’s it, yeah,” I said. “You must have read Ari’s report.”

  Willa smiled. “The Guild gets all the news about gates, honey. Don’t you worry about that! Your dad told us about the Diana statue.”

  “My dad?”

  “Once a Guildsman, always a Guildsman. Soon as he got out of slam, he reported in and got his status back. That was over on Five, when he was first paroled.”

  I gaped. Willa chuckled at my surprise.

  “Even when he was hiding out here on Four, he was in touch with us now and then,” Willa continued. “Now of course he’s hoping to get his son into the Guild, and I don’t see why not. Michael, one of your brothers. You must know he’s—”

  “A world-walker. Oh, yeah,” I said. “He isn’t real good at hiding it.”

  The suitcase might have been a nuisance, but Spare14 took charge of it. One of his desk drawers had a limited trans-world capacity. Although it couldn’t transfer items to every deviant level, he’d had an office with another such desk on Three for years. The connection remained alive even though he himself no longer worked there. He put our suitcase, which was a lot bigger than the drawer, into the drawer and closed it, even though it shouldn’t have closed with that large a suitcase in it.

  “There,” he said. “You can pick it up at my old office in SanFran. The new operative has the place.”

  “Who is it?” Ari said.

  “Hendriks, poor fellow.” Spare14 sighed in sincere pity. “The liaison captain there—Anna Kerenskya, if you remember—wants to keep an eye on him, so she got him the post. She thinks he’s too prone to hasty action and needs seasoning.” He shook his head. “Poor fellow.”

  Spare14 gave Ari things we’d need, like wads of different kinds of cash for SanFran and San Francisco Six, and little badges of pink gel that would monitor our radiation exposure in SanFran. He also handed me an old-fashioned photograph of Scott Trotter—an alive Trotter, that is—which I put in my shoulder bag. We left the office and took a cab down to South Park, the overlap area with Terra Three. Unlike the situation with Six, Willa brought us through without the slightest difficulty, although we found a problem waiting for us in SanFran.

  The run-down oval of green space teemed with Dodger fans holding a rally. They’d assembled a platform of sorts out of wooden produce crates, where a guy with a bullhorn was leading anti-Giants cheers. Occasionally, he made an obscene reference to the Pope, as well. We found a quiet corner among two trees and an overgrown shrub.

  “I’ve got another job,” Willa said. “But I’ll meet you at Hendriks’ office late in the day. Around four PM. Okay?”

  “That will be fine,” Ari said.

  Loud cheers drifted over from the rally as an actual Dodger player stepped up on the platform to speak. Willa fished a violet focus orb out of her bag, held it up, and vanished. Ari and I headed for the street that curved around the park. A couple of thugs dressed in blue Dodger paraphernalia shoved their way in front of us. They reeked of beer and cheap dope.

  “You!” one of them snarled at Ari. “Are you Orange or Blue?”

  “Purple,” Ari said calmly. “I’m Jewish.”

  I’ve never seen anyone look so utterly confused as the Dodger Dude did at that moment. We smiled, stepped around him, and hurried on our way.

  Ari had to guide me through the maze of shabby streets, all of them paved with brick, not asphalt, that led to Market, the main downtown street in SanFran as it was at home. Terra Three in general, and SanFran in particular, teems with other psychic minds. I was registering such an overload of warnings, intuitions, images, and fragments of visions that I had trouble remembering why we were there. Fortunately, I’d learned some ways of dealing with the babble during our last trip there. I pulled free of the mob a few minds at a time, shutting off one psychic healer here, a pair of tarot readers there, a couple of raw untrained intuitives in the distance, a few honed talents nearer by, on and on until at last I’d cleared a free space around me on the aura field.

  “Feel better?” Ari said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can think again.”

  By then we’d reached Market Street, lined with four- and five-story soot-stained buildings instead of skyscrapers and fancy stores. On this deviant level it runs to six lanes, just like at home, but unlike at home, the traffic’s sparse. Only occasionally did we see a boxy, 1920s-style automobile, cobbled together out of disparate parts, go chuggi
ng past on the brick pavement. Down the middle of the street ran battered yellow streetcars. We took one out, that is, away from the Ferry Building, to the corner of Turk, a few blocks away from Wagner and Son, Used Books.

  The shop occupied the ground floor of a grubby stone building. Behind a layer of orange cellophane, the front window displayed heaps and piles of books and magazines. We went inside to the jingle of bells attached to the door. Books were stacked everywhere in the long, dimly lit room. Dusty shelves lined the walls and divided the middle of the room into narrow aisles. In between the rows, cardboard boxes held stacks of books. Between the boxes, heaps sat right on the floor. We picked our way through the aisles to the long wooden counter in back. The proprietor himself stood waiting for us in the pool of light cast by a tarnished gooseneck lamp—an ordinary looking guy, neither tall nor short, dressed in a dirty white T-shirt and a pair of much-mended gray slacks. At the sight of us, his dark eyes narrowed behind his wire frame glasses.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Mitch said. “It’s my dear old Jamaican friend again. What is it now?”

  “Mind your manners, Wagner,” Ari said. “You must know who I really am. No doubt it’s all over town.”

  “That you’re a CBI agent?” Mitch said. “Yeah, it is. What do you think I’ve done, and what will it cost me to get out of it?”

  “Nothing new and nothing. I need an ident, that’s all. O’Grady, you’ve got the photo.”

  I took the picture of Scott Trotter out of my bag and handed it to Mitch. His SPP screamed surprise, and his face mirrored the feeling.

  “It’s not Scorch,” Ari said. “But this bloke is equally dead. You don’t have to be afraid of him.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen the stiff. Someone slit his throat for him.”

  “Good. I like whoever it was already. Yeah, I know this guy.”

  “Is he the one who sold you the transport orbs?”

  “You got it, yeah. I take it I won’t be getting any more of them.”

  “Not from him,” I put in. “Unless you can wake the walking dead.”

  “Very funny.” Mitch gave me the photo back. “I’ll miss the money the damn things brought in, but I can’t say I’ll miss the guy. Not one little bit. He scared the shit out of me.”

  “The Axeman will have to find another source for orbs, too, won’t he?”

  “Jeez!” Mitch took a step back from the counter. “You guys have been busy digging up dirt.”

  “It’s our job.” Ari reached into his jeans pocket and took out a twenty dollar bill of SanFran money. “Do you know what the Axe does with the people he takes off this level?”

  Twenty bucks bought a lot in California Three. Mitch looked bitterly and honestly disappointed. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “Do you know where they contact him?”

  Mitch brightened again. “Yeah. Over in Cow Hollow. A cathouse called Peri’s.”

  “What is this?” I said. “A men-only scam?”

  “No,” Mitch said. “During the day it’s safe for a dame to go into the front room and leave a message with the madam. Peri’s is a high-class place.”

  Ari laid the bill down on the counter. Mitch snatched it and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  “What about you, Mitch?” I said. “Have you ever thought about leaving SanFran?”

  “No.” He looked honestly shocked. “I couldn’t take my books with me. What good would that be?”

  “The Axe doesn’t let his clients bring a lot of luggage, then?” Ari said.

  “Nah. They’ve got to be ready to run in case there’s cops waiting for them. You never know when someone’s going to rat you out in an operation like his. And he’s got to have help, if you know what I mean, on the other side of wherever.”

  “True. Some advice. Keep your nose clean. I might have to come back and ask you more questions.” Ari flipped open the shirt to reveal the Beretta. “Get it?”

  Mitch groaned. “All too well, yeah. I hope you have real good luck—somewhere else.”

  We left the bookstore and walked to Powell to catch the cable car up and over Nob Hill. We got off at Broadway, a quiet, narrow street lined with houses and trees for the first part of our trip. When we reached Stockton, I was appalled to realize that the easy-access tunnel I was expecting did not exist. We were faced with one of the city’s steepest hills, the kind where the sidewalks have stairs built right in.

  “Just as well,” Ari said. “I wouldn’t have trusted the tunnel anyway. Too dangerous if someone was waiting for us inside.”

  I moaned piteously, but there was no hope for it—up and over we went. As we climbed, Ari strode right up the stairs while I panted along behind. At the top I stopped and refused to go on without a rest.

  “If you’d only work out,” Ari said, “you wouldn’t have these difficulties.”

  I had just enough energy left to kick him. He laughed.

  The view from the top of the hill looked eastward across the bay to Berkeley and Oakland, small clusters of houses and other buildings set against mostly open hillsides. I could pick out the campanile on the university campus—assuming it was indeed the campus, of course, and not some other institution with a bell tower. No bridge spanned the water to Yerba Buena Island and beyond. A few fishing boats bobbed in the bay, and I saw a ferry churning along toward Berkeley. The city below sounded oddly quiet, eerie without the mutter of the traffic that I would have heard at home.

  Overhead, the yellow sky swirled with clouds of radioactive dust. In them I saw faces, angry women’s faces, their mouths contorted in rage, their long hair streaming out behind them as they flew, darting back and forth, swooping low only to climb again on huge wings that flashed with sparks of yellow fire. Their long tunics billowed around them. Their claws lashed at the air. In the wind I heard their voices shrieking in a strange language. I heard one of them cry out, “Oi moi! Peplegmai!” and realized that it was Greek, very old Greek.

  “Nola!” Ari caught me by the shoulders. “What is it?”

  The women disappeared. I saw only the yellow dust of Interchange and heard only the wind.

  “Nola, please?” Ari shook me, but gently. “Talk to me.”

  “Okay. I, uh …” I felt the earth moving beneath my feet and forgot what I wanted to say.

  Ari caught and steadied me. “What did you see?”

  “The Furies. Come for Agamemnon, I guess. For someone.”

  “Do you need to sit and rest? I can’t carry you down. It’s too steep.”

  “I’ll be all right in a minute. Just one of my visions. Or an omen, this time. I guess. I don’t know.”

  He put an arm around me and supported me while I trembled. It only took a few moments for the fit to pass off. I filed the vision away in my memory and concentrated on breathing. As my breath calmed, the earth stopped moving. I could see the daily world again.

  Once I felt normal, or as normal as I ever do, we climbed down more stairs to the flat or at least flatter sidewalk below. Broadway continued narrow and quiet, unlike the gaudy strip mall of vice that existed on our own world level. We hiked all the way down to Columbus. In the alley behind La Venezia Bookstore we arrived at the front door of a shabby little building. It housed a defunct nightclub on the ground floor and the TWIXT observer’s office above. Ari took a lockpick out of his jeans pocket and opened the security door to reveal the stairs up. Distantly I heard an alarm ring.

  “It’s just us, Hendriks!” Ari called up.

  We stepped in and shut the door behind us. At the top of the smelly, narrow stairs Jan stood waiting, Beretta in hand, but he kept the gun pointing down at the floor. Unlike his usual sober clothes, he was wearing tight white slacks and a red, magenta, and gold flowered shirt that just about glowed in the dark. I averted my eyes as we climbed the stairs.

  “That shirt!” Ari said.

  “If I’m a numbers runner, I should have poor taste,” Jan said. “I have inherited Sneak Spare
’s business, you see. His clients expect a lowlife, and a lowlife I have become.”

  “They should call you Flash Hendriks,” I said, “if you’re going to dress like that.”

  He grinned. “I like that. I’ll use it.” He stroked the shirt. “I got this in The Hague on Four. There’s a big flea market on the Malieveld. You can get all sorts of things there.”

  “Legal or not, I suppose,” Ari said.

  “They are legal in the Netherlands.” Hendriks thought for a moment. “At least, they are on Four.”

  At first sight, the office had changed little since last I’d seen it: the same dirty white walls, beat-up gray-and-green carpet, and sagging green couch. Spare14’s old desk sat by the window with its rotary dial landline phone upon it. Our suitcase stood next to it. After our long walk, I had to use the bathroom off the tiny kitchen. In both rooms, the cream-and-black tiles and the appliances had been scrubbed, a very welcome change.

  I came back out to the office to find Ari reading printout from TWIXT. When I sat down on the couch, he handed it to me, a report on the Kingdom of Christ over on Terra Six. It took only a couple of sentences to make my stomach clench. They were Reconstructionists, allegedly Christian but Dominionists of the worst stripe, those who believed in theocracy and the rule of Biblical law—according to their own interpretation of the Bible, of course.

  If ever the multiverse needs yet another example of the evil that results when the Order principle gets taken to extremes, I’ve found one on Terra Six. The Kingdomites were determined, according to the TWIXT report, to spread their doctrines until their leaders ruled North America. I was willing to bet that if by some weird fluke they succeeded, they wouldn’t stop at North America.

  I’m a totally lapsed Catholic, but some remnant of my childhood rose to the surface of my indignant mind. “These people,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, “are not real Christians.”

  “Don’t ever say that to them,” Jan said. “It could prove fatal.”

  While I finished reading, Ari told Jan what we’d learned from Wagner down at the bookstore. I was too angry at what I was reading to listen. Women as property and baby-producing machines, gays punished by death, Morality Police everywhere, preachers in every government post, other religions strictly prohibited—the Kingdom of Christ had so little to do with Jesus’ actual words that I was surprised they hadn’t banned the gospels. They’d certainly banned enough other books that disagreed with them. At the very end of the report came the kicker. They’d reinstituted slavery because it existed in the Old Testament. Poor people ended up owned if they couldn’t pay their debts. Children born in slavery stayed in slavery. The theocracy’s big upgrade—slaves could be any color or race. Why limit the field when there was profit to be made?