Angel whistled through her front teeth. She read some of the list of charges, “Smuggling contraband genetics out of Africa, moving a nuclear trigger from Germany to Kurdistan—yeah, the Axis must love him—assassinations and attempts on council members from Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, North Somalia . . . What’s he got to do with the Fed?”
Anaka looked at her with an expression she had trouble reading. She could see him saying, “You see? You see? This is what the world is really like.” Damn him.
What Anaka actually said was, “The CIA hired him in an advisory capacity in ’56.”
Angel closed her eyes and shook her head. No, the world is not some nut’s paranoid wet dream.
“That’s what Interpol gives me. And when I hit the FBI database with the name Obura Dambela, I get a faceful of national security.”
Angel leaned against the inside of the side door and slid slowly to the ground. Great. Byron was a CIA agent. A vulpine James Bond remake cast by some morey garage-vid producers for a three-digit channel in the high five-hundreds.
She stared for a long time, between her feet. “Maybe it’s just crazy.”
“What?”
“Maybe the U.S. Government is simply insane.” Angel sighed. “Gotta be it.”
Reality had taken the final plunge for her. Things had warped beyond recognition. Byron worked for the Fed, effing wonderful. Maybe he was involved in busting President Merideth’s aliens. Yeah, she could see the vid-drama on the comm right now. Every week Byron Dorset, vulpine secret agent, would investigate a new corporate front—only to find it teeming with white blubbery alien beings. After the mandatory shoot-out, all would safely end with the aliens being shipped off to the VanDyne-built facility on Alcatraz.
Except the last episode where Byron gets gored by a cat in a seedy motel room. Even so, a ten year run isn’t bad for a series. Especially one this bad. Ten year run with a surprise ending—everyone would have thought the aliens’d get him.
Wait a minute.
Ten year run?
VanDyne was only bought out by the Fed last February. If anything, Byron had been working for the previous owners. Suddenly her thinking was going off in all sorts of uncomfortable directions.
She began wondering when, exactly, Van Dyne started building the Alcatraz dome, and when, exactly, did the Fed “convert” it to an alien habitat to hold the captured aliens. She began wondering if Byron was telling the truth when he said he’d been “laid off,” perhaps because of new management. She began to suspect why Byron was suddenly operating on his own.
Maybe he had no choice but to buck the program.
And Angel began to wonder about the nature of Byron’s original employers.
Angel’s thoughts swam in ever-deeper circles until a sudden revelation slammed her out of it.
“Oh, fuck, Lei!”
“What?”
She’d been so fucking stupid! “Damn it, if those moreaus were looking for it, why did they think I had it?”
“Had what?”
“They searched my place first! Anaka, you got to get me home, now.”
Angel got a sinking feeling as the van turned on to Twenty-third. She could see the police flashers from a block away. There were also a few new vans here and there, and as the van closed, Angel could see the landing lights of another news aircar approaching.
“Let me out.”
Angel opened the passenger door before Anaka had stopped the van. She hit the pavement, stumbled, and ran toward the commotion. She kept shaking her head and squeezing her eyes shut as if the scene was a hallucination and when her eyes opened the world would return to normal.
The cockeyed hill was more bizarre than ever, and it felt like the damn street was rolling slowly under her feet.
She started to push through the crowd, shoving aside moreaus twice her size. She was greeted with curses, growls, and the occasional feline hiss. She made it to the police line and—oddly—the first image to catch her eye was the bay window on the second floor. It had been pushed out, busting all the panes over the sidewalk. Lei’s expensive drapes were blowing out, over the side of the house. It looked as if something was thrown from—
“No,” Angel whispered.
A cop tried to keep her from breaking the police line, but she ducked under his arm. Some of the vids must have recognized her because she had to push through a gauntlet of reporters to make it to the door.
“Miss Lopez, just one question—”
“—does this have anything to do—”
“—you think they were after you—”
“—with your statement about Byron Dorset’s death—”
“—feel any responsibility—”
The world was slowing down and the reporters’ questions degenerated into an incomprehensible rush of sound. She pushed through the middle of them, not stopping even to look at their faces. Most slid out of her way, managing to stay uncomfortably close. The last one didn’t move and Angel drove a light kick to his shin that took him down to the pavement.
As she stepped inside her building, she ran straight into Detective White. “Lopez—” He began, grabbing her arm.
“Where is she?”
“We need to talk, rabbit.”
“Where?”
“St. Luke’s—in surgery. Luckier than that geriatric lion.”
Not Balthazar, too. Angel pulled away from his arm. “I’m going.”
White extended his other arm across the doorway, blocking her exit. “I said we need to talk.”
“What fucking planet you on? You gonna take me down in front of a dozen vids—after some freaked bastards slam-dunked my roommate?”
“If I have to, you little twitch.” White stared at her with eyes that were thoroughly pissed at the world. Eyes that were about to do something drastic. “We can talk on the way. Should go to St. Luke’s in any event. Need to see a doctor.”
Chapter 17
White drove her in a familiar car, a puke-green Plymouth Antaeus. Though Angel didn’t remember the cavernous interior so filled with fast-food containers during the last ride. He mumbled, muttered, and chewed up the road like it was trying to attack him.
“Fuck’s your problem?” Angel asked, quietly. She was torn between irritation and worry, between being pissed off at the world, or being horrified by it.
And, worse, she kept thinking about Balthazar. The lion she hardly knew had the bad sense to open his door at the absolute worst time. She had caught a glimpse of his apartment as White dragged her away, and she still couldn’t get the image of a twisted wheelchair draped in the old lion’s cartoon blanket out of her mind.
“My problem?” White pulled a turn on to Dolores that did well to illustrate the mass of the Plymouth. God help any compacts that got in its way. “Boy, you got nerve. Everybody’s got nerve.”
Mission rolled by and became younger as they proceeded. Somewhere past the park the only relic of the last century was the location of the road. “Everybody’s gone nuts. Jesus! Folks are going to start sniping at cops and call it self-defense.”
White shook his head and glared at Angel. “You think I have it in for you, don’t you?”
“No,” she said as sweetly as she could muster—it wasn’t much. “All my friends strong-arm me on a regular basis.”
“Everyone’s forgotten the way things work . . .” White mumbled to himself, and in a disgusted tone of voice addressed Angel. “You think I do this shit for my health? You think I’m here just to ride your ass? I’m a cop, you rodent twitch, a good cop. You even know what a good cop is?”
“Huh?” It didn’t seem a safe question to answer directly.
White didn’t pay attention to her. He went on as if he had forgotten it was a dialogue. “It isn’t the cowboy lone-ranger shit. It isn’t slamming the perp into the pavement, whatever people think. It
isn’t this political bullshit, or race, or species. It isn’t justice— You want to know what the fuck a good cop is?”
“Well—”
“It’s taking down scum with something that’ll hold. Period. Swim in a cesspool, shit sticks to you. But if you do your fucking job you don’t waste your time on assholes that’ll walk.”
Angel looked at the balding detective. White was staring down the road, shaking his head. “Damn it. A clean bust, a righteous bust. For once we got the Knights by the balls, and it gets fucked all to hell!”
Angel couldn’t take this anymore. “What are you talking about?”
“Fucking-A Knights of Humanity. Thank you very much.”
White bumped over the curb as he turned across the intersection at Market. “You and my ex-partner.”
White had lost her. “I’m not getting you.”
“I have to paint a picture? This goes beyond your dead boyfriend. Someone big backs the Knights, someone untouchable. We had murder one hanging over those freakheads, they were damn close to rolling over. Earl would’ve blabbed to high heaven—if he’d lived. But no. You had to go media-happy and torpedo the murder case. They clam.” White’s knuckles were beginning to pale as he gripped the steering wheel. He was shaking slightly. “Then—damn it—then you know what happens?”
Angel shook her head silently.
White jerked the car to a stop in the parking lot of St. Luke’s Veterinary and killed the engine. “Then my partner goes solo and pokes around VanDyne Industrial. Suddenly the U.S. Attorney General is talking to the DA, and the DA cuts a deal—and Anaka is out on permanent vacation, I’m in danger of being transferred, and our whole case with the Knights turns to shit—and the moreys in this town think we’re protecting those freaks.” White slammed his door open, gouging the car next to it. “We’re here, let’s check on your roommate.”
Angel followed White out of the car. It made a warped sort of sense. All this crap about Byron’s death, a lot of the problems she had with the police anyway, simply came about because the Knights were higher on the SFPD shit list. Great. “Keep complaining, White. You got the firebug, she’s ready to sing a fucking aria—”
“Was.” They walked into the hospital. “Since the Knights brought in their own lawyer—a high-class country-club type from DC yet—everyone’s suffering amnesia.”
Angel suspected that Igalez would be relieved.
The visit to the hospital didn’t amount to much. Lei was still in surgery, undergoing spinal reconstruction, and she’d be unconscious at least twenty-four hours after the operation. The doctor who talked to them seemed torn between expressing concern for the patient and showing outright hostility to the lepine moreau who’d given St. Luke’s such bad press.
The detail that really sank into Angel’s gut—beyond the mention of microsurgery, experimental cybernetics, and even the possibility of paralysis—was the fact the doctors had to amputate Lei’s tail. That hit home. Angel couldn’t picture Lei without her tail wagging.
Angel absorbed the news silently, her gut shriveled up into a tiny ball of anger in a pool of sick emptiness. And, damn it, what for? What did Lei have to do with this except be at the wrong place at the wrong time?
The world not only wasn’t fair, it was actively hostile.
When it was clear they weren’t going to get a chance to see Lei, White put his hand on Angel’s shoulder. “Come on.”
“What?”
“We’ve got to talk with the doctor who did the autopsy on Byron Dorset.”
That pierced through the muck clouding her thinking. She remembered her run-in with Ellis in the hospital parking lot. Angel remembered just how paranoid the doctor had been acting.
Wait a minute . . .
Didn’t Anaka say that Doctor Ellis was missing?
She thought of mentioning the fact to White, but White didn’t look to be in the mood for inconvenient revelations. Instead she asked, “You need me for this?”
“Police protection. I ain’t letting you out of my sight.”
Sounds like police harassment to me. Angel wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or grateful. However, she knew better than to argue at this point. White had been pushed a little too far.
They didn’t stop at the reception desk—they went straight to the elevator. White told the elevator to go to the sixth floor. Angel leaned up against the wall, feeling the fatigue catch up with her. “Why now?”
“Why what?” White asked as the elevator doors slid open on a dimly lit reception area. White walked up to a holo directory and began tapping at it.
“Why the sudden interest in Byron’s death?”
White found what he was looking for and led Angel down an empty office corridor that led radially off of the lobby. The corridor here smelled different, there was less of the blood-fur-fecal aroma that marked most of the hospital. Even so, the smell of pine disinfectant was as strong as ever.
“I told you, the murder rap on the Knights turned to shit.”
White stopped in front of a closed office door. No lights shone behind the fogged window. “No one home,” Angel said.
White grunted what seemed to be an affirmative monosyllable and pulled a slim keypad out of his pocket. The small wallet computer had the SFPD phoenix burned into the case, as well as a prominent serial number. White tried the door. It was locked. That determined, he knelt in front of the door. Angel heard his joints popping, and imagined that hauling that kind of bulk around wasn’t pleasant.
With his eyes level with the lock mechanism, White started tapping at the keypad.
“What are you doing?” Angel was getting the feeling that the situation here wasn’t quite kosher.
White made a derisive noise. “What does it look like?”
White’s keypad beeped and displayed a long alphanumeric on its screen. White tapped it into the keypad of the lock mechanism. Even though it was obvious to Angel that the lock also required a ramcard to open it, the thing blinked green at White and opened.
“White, do you have a warrant—is this legal?”
“Would you shut up and get in?”
Angel had the distinct impression that White was very much aware of the fact that Pat Ellis was missing.
White pushed her through the door and closed it behind him. Angel stumbled into the darkened office and bumped into a desk. “What the hell are you doing?”
White pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and sat himself behind the desk. “I’m finding out what Dr. Ellis thought about the deceased.” Within a few minutes, White was rummaging through the doctor’s collection of ramcards. Angel found a seat and slid into it. The two of them sat in silence as White played with the doctor’s computer.
Angel was uncomfortable. If someone found the two of them in here, she was pretty damn sure that she’d be the one who got shafted. Also, something about the room was making her nervous.
Could it be the disinfectant smell?
Of course it smelled familiar, all that pine shit smelled the same—right? It would be paranoid to think it meant that the folks who covered their scent back at her apartment had been here. She’d be treading on Anaka’s territory.
But she could swear the disinfectant downstairs had been more lemon-scented.
She resisted pounding her feet on the carpet.
After a period of shuffling ramcards and searching the desk, White said, “Somewhere between the good doctor and the DA, the data on the corpse changed. The doctor herself, I haven’t been able to get hold of her since you went on the net and started kicking shit about the ‘accidental’ cremation.”
“Great.” It was pretty much obvious. If you assumed that Byron’s accidental cremation was no accident, it was a foregone conclusion that it was to destroy evidence that Ellis falsified the autopsy. Probably to cover the fact a morey offed Byron. “You know, I talke
d to her Saturday.” Angel ran her hand over the chair she sat in. Something about it was making her itch.
White looked up from the doctor’s comm, his face underlit by a blue glow from the screen. “Oh?” It sounded slightly accusatory.
“She acted paranoid.” Join the club. “Told me that she thought a moreau did it.” Angel lifted her hand from the arm of the chair, there was a mass of gray hair that clung to her fingers.
“Oh, great, what else have you been holding back, rabbit?”
“Don’t start pretending that’d you’d have listened to me back when you still had a hard-on for the Knights.”
White grumbled. “Just answer the question, Lopez. Is there other shit hanging around I should know about?” Then something caught his eye on the screen and he hit the computer in disgust. “Nothing!”
“Think the doctor is responsible for Byron’s cremation?” Angel repeated her own suspicions and shook the gray hair from her hand. Of course there was fur on the chair. St. Luke’s was a veterinary hospital.
“Great way to cover a botched autopsy. But she worked on the files too damn well. There isn’t even a file on Dorset. The damn slate’s wiped.”
“Could someone in the Fed—”
“Oh, please. Don’t get on my ex-partner’s conspiracy trip.” White stood up. “Let’s go. I’m putting you in a safe-house.”
As they left, Angel ran her hand over the one other chair facing the desk. It came back with short tawny hairs. She imagined a feline scent when she held them very close to her nose.
Great. Should she tell him? No, let him figure it out. If it was the feline hit squad that did Byron, made sense that it was the feline hit squad that terrified Ellis into fucking up the autopsy. That fit the pattern, and it wasn’t what worried Angel overmuch.
What worried Angel was the fact that the disinfectant downstairs was lemon scented.
• • •
The safe house they stuck her in was a dingy set of rooms in the Tenderloin. An off-white prequake structure that called itself the Hotel Bruce in broken neon. It was part of a wretched mash of prequake hotels and cheap postquake modular high-rises. People called the modular things ice trays. The hotel was flanked by arrays of flaking chrome cubes and dirt-specked windows. The ice trays must’ve started falling apart as soon as the contractors got paid.