The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

There was a slight change in the quality of light in the room as the screen activated. This comm was mute, the synth chip had burned out a decade ago. He made sure the forwarding list was up to date, and got a bit of a surprise in the mail—a note from Stephie Weir. She’d found his listed number. It had been forwarded to his home comm while he was out. He played her message.

  “Nohar, I need to talk to you. Can we meet for lunch tomorrow at noon? I’ll be at the Arabica down at University Circle.”

  That was it. At least the joint she picked for the meet wasn’t adverse to moreys. Although Nohar wasn’t a great fan of coffee or coffeehouses, the college crowd seemed a little more tolerant.

  He wondered what she wanted.

  Nothing more interesting on the comm, so he opened the file drawer. It was nearly filled by a dented aluminum case, about a meter long by a half wide. The electronic lock on the case had long been broken, and there were scorch marks on that side. There was a painstaking cursive inscription on the lid that contrasted with the ugly functionalism of the box itself. The inscription read, “Datia Rajasthan: Off the Pink.”

  He pulled his father’s case out of the drawer. The lock had been broken for nearly a decade, ever since Datia Rajasthan had been gunned down by a squad of National Guardsmen. Nohar’d gotten it a few weeks later when he split the Hellcats.

  Nohar opened it. The seal was still good. The lid opened with a tearing sound as the case sucked in air and released the smell of oil. Nohar looked at the gun. The Indian military had manufactured the Vindhya 12-millimeter especially for their morey infantry. A pink’s wrist couldn’t handle the recoil. It was made of gray metal and ceramics, surprisingly light for its size—the barrel alone was 70 centimeters long. The magazine held twelve rounds. There were three magazines in the case, all full. A dozen notches marred the composite handgrip.

  He held up the gun and cleared it, checked the safety, and slid a full magazine in. The magazine slid home with a satisfying solidity. The Vindhya was in perfect condition, even after ten years of neglect. The weight was seductive in his hand.

  Nohar had practice with guns before it was a felony for a morey to own a firearm, but he had never even taken this one out of its case.

  There were two holsters in the drawer. He left the combat webbing and removed the worn-leather shoulder holster. Nohar had never worn it, but he tried it on now. It fit well, comfortably, and that disturbed him.

  One final item—a file folder containing a sheet of paper and a card for his wallet. Both items were pristine, the card still in its cellophane wrapper. It was the gun’s registration and his license to use it. They were still valid, despite the ban on morey firearms. He’d gotten them a year prior to the ban.

  He put the card in his wallet, holstered the loaded gun, and, hot as it was, put on his trench. Nohar had brought the trench coat despite the fact there had been little threat of rain. He had brought it to hide the gun. He pocketed the two extra magazines and put the case back in the drawer. As he locked the drawer up again, he told himself he was never going to fire the thing, but he knew, if he’d really believed that, he would have never opened that drawer.

  Nohar left the office, the gun an oppressive weight under his shoulder.

  • • •

  Angel was awake again when Nohar returned with the groceries. She began cursing in Spanish the second he opened the door. Nohar had thought he’d get back before she woke up. After an experience like she’d been through, she should have slept like the dead.

  “We had a fucking deal, Kit—” More Spanish. “You don’t leave me alone like that.”

  He ducked through the living room and into the kitchen, shucking the trench as he went. Cat followed Nohar, and the food, into the kitchen.

  “You listening to me, Kit?”

  The dry cat food was still covering the counter where he had spilled it last night. Nohar had forgotten the mess. He set down his bag and picked up Cat’s dish. After rinsing it off, he swept about half the spilled food off the counter and into the dish. When he put it down, Cat pounced on the bowl, oblivious to the fact that it was filled with the same stuff that was on the counter.

  Nohar decided he could afford the waste and brushed the rest of the spill into the sink and turned on the disposal.

  Angel was leaning against the door frame. She looked a lot better. She had taken a shower, returning her dirty brown coat to its original light tan. Her ears had perked up, though even with them she was still over a meter shorter than Nohar.

  She was jabbering in Spanish, and Nohar knew she wasn’t saying anything nice.

  He asked her what she wanted to eat.

  She walked into the kitchen and looked into the bag. She was still angry, Nohar could smell it, but her tone was softening. “And I thought you weren’t a cop.”

  “I’m not.”

  She squatted next to Cat. She was calming down, and Nohar began to realize exactly how scared she must have been when she woke up here alone. Angel was someone who wouldn’t like being scared. It would screw with her self-image.

  Angel was looking at Nohar’s left armpit. “What about the sudden artillery?”

  Nohar had forgotten the Vindhya. “Just because I have a gun—”

  “That righteous? That fine? Something that worthy goes for 5K at least. Tell me you bought it.”

  She tried to pet Cat, but Cat was eating and couldn’t be bothered. When Cat hissed at her, she stopped.

  Nohar began putting away the stuff he’d bought, tossing a half-kilo of burger into the micro for himself. “I didn’t buy it. My father brought it over from the war. Got it when he died.”

  She stood up. She wasn’t argumentative anymore. She seemed to have gotten it out of her system. “Knew your sire?”

  “It’s not unheard of.”

  “Only morey I heard of with a set.” She intercepted a bag of tomatoes he was putting in the fridge. “Even the rats make kids with a needle, and they’re as common as fleas on a Ziphead. How’d two modified panther tigris ever get together to make you?”

  The micro dinged at him and he pulled out the burger. Angel’s nose wrinkled. She was vegetarian.

  “Mother and Father were in the same platoon. He led a mass defection. The entire company of tigers, even the medic. Of all the cubs he must’ve made, I was the only one to track him down afterward.”

  From her expression he could tell he’d talked too much. “Hot shit, that is a Vind twelve. You’re talking about the Rajasthan Airlift. You knew Datia—”

  “Yes, I knew him, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Nohar took his food and ducked into the living room.

  Angel followed, with her tomato. “Datia’s a legend, the first real morey leader—”

  Oh, that was great. A true leader. Nohar whipped around to face Angel. Cat was there to pounce on a spilled hunk of burger. “Datia Rajasthan was a psychopath. He needed to be gunned down, and if you so much as mention him one more time I am gong to hand-feed you to the Zips one piece at a time.”

  Angel just stared at him.

  Nohar sat on the couch, ate a handful of hamburger, and turned on his comm to the news.

  Chapter 11

  Monday morning was breaking into a steel-gray dawn when the Jerboa pulled up in front of Young’s shadow house. “Wake up, Angel. We’re here.” The rabbit, who’d looked like an inanimate pile of clothes until Nohar spoke, stirred. “Kit? Time is it?”

  “Five after.” Nohar stood up and stepped over the nonworking driver’s side door. Young’s house was the worse for wear. The garage had gone up like a bomb. The only remains of it was a black pile of charred debris at the end of the driveway. The house itself had caught. Nohar supposed some burning debris had landed on the roof.

  There was a yawn from behind him that seemed much too large for the rabbit. “Five after what?”

  “Six.”
The fire had gutted the house to the basement. The windows looked in on one large, black, empty, roofless space. The two neighboring buildings—Nohar hoped they had been unoccupied—had caught, too, but had escaped with relatively light damage.

  “Six, Kit, this is no sane time to be awake—”

  “You said that when I woke you up.”

  “Could have let me sleep—”

  Nohar shook his head. “Not after that tirade yesterday.”

  Angel hopped over the door. She was dressed in an avalanche of black webbing and terry cloth that used to belong to Maria. The only clothing Nohar had for her. Somehow Angel had gotten the castoffs to fit her with a shoelace and a few strategic knots. The problem was, she smelled like Maria. “Couldn’t wait till a decent hour?”

  “Quit complaining. If I had a safe place to file you, I’d do it. For now, Your along for the ride.”

  Angel yawned again. Her mouth opened so wide it seemed to add twenty centimeters to her height. She shook her head and her ears flopped back and forth.

  “So, what we doing here?”

  Nohar started walking down the driveway. He could smell the gasoline. Even now, after at least one night of rain, there was still no question of arson. “I want to see if anything made it through the fire.”

  They passed the rear of the house, and the damage was much worse. The entire rear wall of Young’s house had collapsed. The siding was sagging and puckered and bowed in the middle. Angel was only a few steps behind him. “Hope you’re not talking architecture. This place is worse than the tower.”

  Nohar wasn’t talking about architecture.

  There’s a difference between a supervised, methodical destruction of a body of records—Nohar was pretty sure Young was trying to torch, judging by the volume, close to everything in the Binder campaign finance records—and the accidental combustion Young had initiated. Something would have survived.

  Apparently he hadn’t been the only one to think so. He walked up to the spot where the garage used to be. The charred remains were in piles that were much too neat, and it looked like someone had gone through the ashes with a rake. “Damn it.”

  “What’s the prob?”

  Nohar waved at the garage, and expanded the gesture to take in the entire backyard. The rear lawn had been turfed by truck tires to the point that no grass was left. “Someone beat me here. Whoever it was, shoveled up everything Young didn’t torch.”

  Nohar wasn’t expecting to find the piece of evidence, but it would have been nice to find something. Angel was walking around the backyard, wide feet slapping in the mud. When he had looked for clothing for her, Nohar couldn’t find a damn thing that even resembled a shoe for a rabbit.

  “What am I looking for?”

  Nohar was surprised Angel wanted to help. He supposed she was bored. “It was mostly paper. Some might have blown to the edges of the property where our trash-pickers missed it.”

  That was a bit of wishful thinking. The plot was bare of even normal garbage. Nohar supposed the people with the truck had grabbed everything that had even a slight chance of having been part of the records. They had a full weekend to work in. They were very thorough. Nohar wondered if they’d been the cops, or Binder’s people, or MLI, or—

  Nohar looked up from the edge of the driveway he was examining. “Angel? Do the Zips have any workings with a congressman named Binder?”

  Angel’s laugh was somewhat condescending. “Must be kidding. Zips and politics? Me becoming president’d happen sooner. All Zips want is a free hand to deal their flush.”

  Nohar shrugged. A connection seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t deny the fact that there was a connection—somewhere. Hassan was involved with the Zips, and it looked like Hassan killed Johnson. But Hassan wasn’t working for the Zips. If anything, it looked like the other way around.

  “Were the run-ins with the other gangs because of the drugs?”

  “Don’t know about other folks, but my clutch was into protection—When you do, you have to protect people you charge. Both Zips and flush were pretty dangerous.” She sighed. Her ears drooped. “Too dangerous for us.”

  She turned to face him. Her scar fighting the frown she wore. “Could’ve used someone like you back then, Kit.”

  Nohar didn’t have a response for that. So he went back to his fruitless search.

  By nine they had combed every inch of the property at least twice. The only result was part of a letter-fax Angel had found halfway across the street. It had been written by a gentleman named Wilson Scott, presumably to Binder or someone in the campaign. They only had the bottom half, so Nohar didn’t know. It could be totally unrelated.

  The letter went into detail on “the late morey violence.” It got pretty down on the moreys, talking about moreys offing pinks, moreys taking hostages, morey air terrorism, and other generally alarmist topics.

  Sounded like something somebody wrote during the riots. It was dated the tenth of August. Nohar wished he had a year to go with it. He also wished Scott didn’t have a habit of writing in sweeping generalities.

  With just half a hysterical polemic, the morning seemed to have been a waste of time. They didn’t even have an address for Scott.

  • • •

  Nohar took Angel to his office with him. He wanted to make a few phone calls, now that people in the Binder campaign weren’t on vacation. He would have liked the less-cramped atmosphere of his apartment. However, he figured the more he kept Angel away from Moreytown, the better off they both would be.

  Even with Angel, the office wasn’t more cramped. He lifted her up, and she fit on top of the filing cabinet, out of the way—and out of view of the comm . . .

  Not that he intended to use the video pickup. He was going to try and bull through to the one living member of the Bowling Green gang of four he had yet to talk to. Edwin Harrison, the legal counsel.

  Nohar’s funeral picture had him sitting right next to Binder, front row, center. With Daryl Johnson’s death, Harrison would be the most powerful man in the Binder organization, after Binder himself. In fact, Nohar remembered news off the comm had him as the current acting campaign manager.

  The top, or close to it.

  He killed the video pickup and hoped he could reach Harrison before anyone realized who was calling. Nohar also engaged in a slight electronic legerdemain. The outgoing calls he had been placing from his apartment had all been piped through his comm in his office. This was the listed one, his professional voice, so to speak. This was the comm everyone was locking out.

  However, the process worked in reverse. He could pipe calls from the office through the unlisted comm at his home. They wouldn’t be locking that out—yet.

  It turned out to be easier than Nohar had expected. The strained voice and the strained expression on the secretary—from the obvious makeup, and the hair perfect as injection-molded plastic, she would fall into Stephie’s category of window dressing—made it obvious she’d been operating the phones too long. Nohar could see lights blinking on the periphery of the screen. She had at least a dozen calls coming in. The way her eyes darted, she had at least four on the screen.

  Nohar asked for Harrison. Her only response was, “Hold on, I’ll transfer you.”

  The screen fed him the Binder campaign logo and dry synth music as he waited for Harrison’s secretary to pick up the phone. It was a long wait and Nohar had to restrain the urge to claw something.

  The call was finally answered, not by a secretary, but by Harrison himself.

  Edwin Harrison had to be the same age as Young and Johnson. They had all been contemporaries out of college about the same time. But Nohar knew pink markings well enough to see the graying at the temples and the receding hair as some indication of premature aging. Harrison bore the slight scars of corrective optical surgery—Nohar had a brief wish his rotten day-vision could be corrected as
easily—distorting his eyes. Under a nose that had been broken at least once, he had a salt-and-pepper brush of a mustache. There was no real way to estimate height over the comm, but Harrison looked small.

  Harrison’s shirt was unbuttoned and his face looked damp. The man was rubbing his cheek with one hand. Nohar figured he’d been shaving, a pink concept the moreau didn’t understand.

  Nohar found his polite voice. “Mr. Harrison—”

  Harrison sat down in front of his comm. “Whoever you are, if you want to talk to me, you better turn on your video pickup. I can tell the difference between a voice-only phone and someone with a full comm who just doesn’t want to be seen. I have no desire to spend a conversation with a test pattern when you can see me perfectly well.”

  So much for polite.

  Nohar just hoped the guy was too long-winded to hang up immediately. He did as requested.

  Harrison’s reaction was immediate. In the same, level, conversational tone of voice, he said, “Holy mother of God, it’s a hair-job.”

  Hair-job?

  Nohar hadn’t heard moreys referred to as hair-jobs in nearly a decade. “Can we talk?”

  “Mr. Raghastan, correct?”

  Nohar hated it when people mispronounced his name, even if it was only a generic label for that particular generation of tigers. Nohar nodded.

  “I am sorry, but I have a very busy schedule. If you could make an appointment—”

  So you can ignore me at your leisure, Nohar thought. Not without a fight. “I only have a few questions about Johnson and the campaign’s financial records.”

  Harrison seemed to be indecisive about whether he wanted to be evasive or simply hang up. “I am sure you know any financial information that isn’t a matter of public record is confidential. I can refer you to our press secretary. I am sure he can—”

  —brush me off as well as anyone in the campaign, Nohar thought. “No, you don’t understand. I don’t want specifics.” A lie, Nohar thought, but there’s little chance of getting specifics out of you, right? Right. “I was just wondering how thorough Young was in torching the records.”