The house was thick with blood smell. Nohar ran through the rooms in the house, tracking down the carnage he smelled. He passed through a living room, a den, a dining room. . . .
They had done him in the kitchen.
Nohar lowered the gun and stared through the door into Royd’s kitchen. Royd was taped into an antique chair someone had dragged in from the dining room. Nohar could see the scuffs on the kitchen tile. They had propped him up against the wall next to a huge stainless-steel cooktop. More than the blood now, Nohar smelled burned flesh.
Who did you piss off?
Nohar took a few tentative steps into the kitchen. The sink was filled with expensive cutlery, most showing rainbow-burnished edges where someone had heated them red hot. A few dish towels sat in the sink too, stained red. The water in the bottom of the sink was colored a translucent pink.
Nohar looked at Royd. He hadn’t seen anything as bad since the last time he had seen a victim of “shaving,” a nasty ritual practiced by morey gangs when they thought one of their fellows was getting too close to the pinks. . . .
When they shaved someone, they took off most of the top layer of skin. Only most, since the victim usually died halfway through the procedure.
What had been done to Royd was worse. They—whoever they were—had systematically removed bits of flesh from Royd’s arms, torso, and face, cauterizing the wounds so they wouldn’t bleed. When they were finished, they had just slit his throat and let his life drain away.
From the smell, Royd had been here since before the attack on Nohar. The poor bastard hadn’t called out the hit. Which begged the question, who did?
It was beginning to look like the only answers he would get would be from this missing kid, Manuel, and the person who hired Royd to find him.
Nohar backed up and holstered his weapon. He had no desire to contaminate a crime scene with his DNA.
As if the thought were a premonition, outside he began to hear sirens.
He backed out of the kitchen. This was great. Someone did call the cops on him, and with a body in the house. He wasn’t worried so much as annoyed. Dealing with the police was one huge waste of time. He knew that he could look forward to a few hours of interrogation until they discovered that his gun hadn’t been fired, and that Royd had died long before he showed up, then he’d face a few more hours as they grilled him about the arson of his cabin and why he didn’t call it in to anyone. . . .
Nohar really disliked cops. The only species of pink he disliked worse were Fed agents.
He let his breath out in a sigh that was more like a growl. There was no way around it at this point. He headed toward the front door. The sirens were almost on him when he stepped into the foyer. He could hear car doors slamming as he stepped outside.
Nohar began spreading his arms as he stepped outside, showing he was unarmed.
Someone fired.
Instinct had Nohar diving back through the open doorway before it fully registered that the cops were shooting at him. Above him, chunks of Royd’s front door began splintering as slugs tore through the even, vat-grown wood.
When did cops start blowing away unarmed moreys on a disturbance call?
Nohar scrambled backward along the floor as he heard glass breaking inside the house. Adrenaline began pushing him, and he felt the urge to draw his gun and return fire. He suppressed the urge. Escape was his only real option. Escape, and figure out what triggered the goddamn cops.
More glass broke to either side of him. Then, for the moment, the cops stopped shooting. Nohar took the opportunity to get to his feet and head toward the rear of Royd’s house. He ran back toward the dining room.
He smelled the ozone before he saw it, and was diving for cover before it started firing. Thirty-two caliber slugs tore into the walls of the dining room, blowing a china cabinet into shards of glass and porcelain. Hovering above the table was a police drone. It was a tiny remote-controlled helicopter that carried a multispectrum video camera and a built-in submachine gun. With its ovoid body, and dual offset rotors, it looked like a flying rat face, the camera one eye, the gun the other, the rotors its ears.
It didn’t stop firing, and the gun was swinging back toward Nohar.
He did the only thing he could, diving under the dining room table, directly beneath it. He heard it buzz as it tried to reacquire him. He rolled on his back, drew the Vind, and fired three shots—a quarter of the clip—through the table, straight up. The room echoed with the triple explosion from the twelve-millimeter handgun, and the smell of powder-burned wood drifted down from the holes punched through the table.
Nohar also smelled the odor of fried electronics.
That’s it, then. Nohar thought. I’ve nuked one of their toys, there’s no talking to them now.
He rolled out from under the table, and he heard more gunfire from the police. He had really pissed them off.
On the dining room table, the drone had fallen cockeyed, dormant, pointing toward the windows it had crashed through. Ozone smoke leaked from the shattered camera, and its twin counter-rotating rotors were still slowly turning.
Nohar heard the buzz of another drone under the sound of gunfire. It was coming from the den and the living room, toward him.
Nohar kept his gun out as he dove through the kitchen door. The second drone banked into the dining room after him. Nohar dove around the door for cover. He heard it closing on him as he hugged the wall.
The thing was less than a meter square and cleared the doorframe as it entered the kitchen. It started to sweep the room, looking for him, but it stopped when its camera locked on Royd’s body. Nohar was hoping for that. There was still a human operating the thing, as susceptible to surprise as anyone.
Nohar leveled the Vind at the backside of the drone’s chassis and let go with two more shots. The camera exploded and the thing tumbled, slamming into the side of the sink and falling upended at Royd’s feet.
The firing outside stopped again.
Nohar heard the sound of something whistling through the air—Multiple somethings. Either tear gas, trying to drive him out, or concussion grenades to stun him while they took the building. Neither one was something he wanted to stick around for.
The kitchen had a doorway into the garage. He made for it, past Royd, little worried about stray hairs or DNA at this point. He reached the door as he heard multiple hissing explosions throughout the house, and the first acid touch of the gas hit his eyes and nose.
He made it into the garage and slammed the door.
He hadn’t run from the cops since he was fourteen. It always caused more trouble than it solved. But the cops here seemed hell-bent on killing him. Cooperating with authority only went so far.
It was getting hard to see, even in the garage. His eyes watered, and he began coughing. The gas was leaking from the house, through the cracks around the door. Inside it had to be intolerable.
He held a hand over his nose and mouth and looked around the garage. There was only one other way out, the doors pointed out on the driveway, straight at the cops. There wasn’t anywhere else to go.
There were two cars here, the Jaguar aircar and a sleek back BMW with tinted windows. Neither looked bulletproof. . . .
But the tinted windows gave him an idea.
• • •
It took Nohar a few agonizing minutes to short out the lock and get into the BMW. By that time the alarms were going off and the car’s computer was already calling the police—as if that mattered. Once in, he hacked the auto-navigation feature and jacked up the minimum speed to sixty klicks an hour.
Nohar could barely see through his stinging and watering eyes as he got the Jaguar open. By then, he felt he didn’t have much time left. He ducked into the BMW, engaged it in drive, and let the navigation computer take over. Nohar took cover in the Jaguar as the garage door began opening.
The cops began strafing the garage, Nohar could hear the Jaguar taking hits. He could smell melted composites. But he also heard the BMW’s engine rev up. Heard it accelerate out toward the cops. The gunfire got a little more frantic.
While he heard all this going on, Nohar desperately worked on the dash, trying to get the Jaguar moving. He ripped panels covering the control circuits, found the security system, and pulled that card out. He tore a wire from the comm to jump the power connection that had run through the card. With his big hands it took him five times with his claws fully extended to get the jumper in place.
When he did, he heard the flywheel engage and the fans start up.
About then he also heard the sound of something going smash out in the street. Nohar risked a look out the windshield. The Jaguar’s windshield was pock-marked with bulletholes, and through the spider cracks he saw that the BMW had taken a full header into one of the copcars. The Patrol cars were the traditional Dodge Haviers, but the BMW was a luxury car, heavier, and probably had twice as much metal in it. The nav computer was still driving, pushing the T-boned Havier slowly down the street with it. The police were pouring lead into it as if they were the Islamic Axis and the BMW was the entire state of Israel.
He had a chance to get out while the cops were distracted. Nohar set the attitude on the fans near forty-five degrees, and maxed the accelerator.
The Jaguar shot out of the garage like it was a ballistic shuttle on too low an arc. It skimmed over the driveway, barely gaining enough altitude to clear the flashers on top of the cop cars. Gunfire followed the aircar, but most of the shots went wild.
Nohar didn’t have any attention to spare for the cops anyway. He was shooting straight at an old ranch house across the street, and not gaining enough altitude to clear it. He banked, barely clearing the right side of the roof. The sound of breaking glass followed the whine of the aircar’s engines. Nohar didn’t know if it’d been a wild shot from the cops, or if he had hit something.
He shot out from between a pair of houses, over a swimming pool. The backwash from the Jaguar’s fans splashed chlorinated water through someone’s garden.
Nohar hit the headsup, and the windscreen lit with fragmented navigation displays. The one thing that showed clearly on the shattered windscreen was the speedometer. With the aircar’s thrust mostly going forward, he was topping one-forty klicks an hour.
He started dodging palms as he sped over someone’s estate.
The headsup display flashed facets of red at him. It was a warning, probably that he was flying illegally low over Beverly Hills. Nohar checked the rear video and saw two police helicopters on his tail.
Two?
The Beverly cops probably only had two helicopters. Ten to one that the copters meant that it was the LAPD after him. . . .
Which meant that this was some sort of special operation, not just a neighbor calling the cops.
There was little chance he could escape the airborne pursuit. The Jaguar’s computers were screaming for the cops, its transponder a gigantic red flare on LA’s air traffic control screens. He couldn’t gain any altitude, because as soon as he was clear of civilians, the copters riding his ass would probably frag him.
Pretty damn soon he’d be surrounded by police aircars. He had to ditch this thing quickly, somewhere he could get out from under the copters’ eyes.
He began to turn west toward the mountains, away from where most of the cops would be coming. He was inviting fire from the bastards tailing him, but he was going to have to risk it. He hugged the hillside as he followed the slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. The copters didn’t shoot.
Nohar hoped that meant they were unarmed. What it probably meant was that they didn’t want to start a brush fire.
The aircar cleared a line of trees, and he saw what he was looking for. The algae-slick surface of a reservoir glistened in the midst of the woods.
Nohar aimed the Jaguar straight for it.
Chapter 7
The Jaguar sliced into the water like an arrow. It slammed to a stop under the surface, blowing an air bag across Nohar’s face. The inductors blew with a hydraulic explosion that twisted the Jaguar on its side as water shot into the cabin from the bullet holes in the windshield.
Nohar tore the air bag from in front of him.
The aircar was tumbling, the air in the cabin not anywhere near enough to keep the fans afloat. Nohar scrambled as the aircar turned completely upside down, the cabin already half-filled with water. He took a few deep gasps of what remained of the air, and kicked at the windshield.
With the car upside down, the windshield was already completely underwater, and it gave with a single kick. Nohar ducked and pushed himself out the window just as the Jaguar nosed into the mud at the bottom of the reservoir.
Nohar swam blindly, the water dark and blurred with sediment. His head throbbed with the dull sound of machinery. He pushed himself to clear as much distance between him and the wreck as possible. He stayed under until his lungs burned with lack of air, then he pushed through the inch-thick scum of algae on the surface.
When his head hit the air, he sucked in several deep breaths as he spun around to see the nearest harvesting pylon. He dove under again, heading for the pylon. He had to break the surface twice more before he reached it. The second time he broke the surface right in the path of one of the pylon’s three-meter-wide skimming arms; he had to dive under as the rotating boom swept over his head.
Then he made it to the side of the pylon and held himself against it, his head barely above the surface. The shafts of the swimming arms didn’t descend below the surface this close to the pylon, but they swept by only centimeters above him. He sucked in deep breaths and watched the sky.
The copters ran a search pattern over the water. They hadn’t seen him yet. Nohar hoped that they wouldn’t. The machinery running the pylon he clung to should hide his own heat, as should the water and the algae. He held on, his arms going numb and his head throbbing with the rhythm of the pylon as the twenty-meter arms swept a circle in the algae.
They flew low enough for the rotors to ripple holes in the algae, incidentally hiding the scars he’d made when he’d broken the surface. One buzzed the harvesting pylons, the rotor’s backwash spilling green water over him. He was sure that they had him then, but the copter kept flying down the line of pylons, oblivious.
The helicopters searched for what seemed like hours. Long enough for Nohar to get a good look at both of them. One was an LAPD chopper, the other was completely unmarked.
Little question it was a Fed helicopter.
Fed involvement meant the situation was screwed beyond belief. It could have been a Fed black-ops unit that attacked him in the cabin. The whole scene at Royd’s could have been a setup. They knew he wasn’t taken at the cabin, all they’d need to do was stake out Royd’s corpse and wait for their lost morey to show. . . .
What had Royd stepped in?
Both copters eventually stopped the search pattern and hovered over opposite ends of the reservoir. They were waiting for a search party. They weren’t about to give him any breaks. He was going to have to get to shore under the cover of the harvesting pylons.
Nohar unclenched his arms from the side of the pylon and reached up, grabbing the swimming boom as it passed overhead. As it spun, pulling him in circles around the pylon, he pulled himself hand over hand through the foaming muck the arm pushed ahead of itself. The handholds were slick, and once he was a few meters away from the pylon itself, the arm’s mechanism opened up a gaping maw in front of him. Algae foam rose above his head, and slipped past his body into the screens built into the harvesting arm. He tried to get a foothold on the underwater portion of the arm. He had to kick off his shoes, so he could grip with his claws.
It would be easier, and safer, if he grabbed on the trailing end. But the froth on the leading edge offered more cover than
the arm’s wake.
Nohar made it all the way to the edge of the arm, three meters away from the arc of the neighboring pylon. Then he let go, dived, and came up in front of the rushing wall of foam at the edge of the next pylon. The impact stunned him, and he had to grip for two rotations before he felt up to doing it again. Then he had to spin around once more so he could pick out the pylon closest to shore and farthest from the helicopters.
Somehow he managed to make it all the way to the shoreline without alerting the helicopters. He had hitched a ride on three or four of the skimming booms, and his nose had gone numb from the smell of engineered algae. He had turned a color somewhere between shit brown and bile green from the algae stuck to him and his suit. During his ride to shore, some government boys had shown up. He saw them working the shoreline near where the Jaguar had gone down.
He ducked into the woods in the opposite direction. Once out of sight he ran, getting himself as deep in the woods as he could. Living in this kind of terrain for the past seven years made it easy. He kept moving until the sun had gone out of the sky and his body refused to go on anymore.
Sometime after dark he collapsed against a tree and went through his pockets. The Vind had survived. He did his best to clean it. Out of the extra magazines he carried, he was able to find five shells that were dry enough to be trusted to reload the thing. When he was done, he set it down next to him.
His portable comm was a total loss, which didn’t really matter, since the Fed could trace his movements using that comm’s account. It was better off fried.
The binocular camera came with its own case, and seemed to have fared better. He set it aside with his wallet to dry.
He had no clue what the hell he was going to do now.
As he stared at his algae-sodden wallet, fatigue claimed him with iron claws, dragging him into unconsciousness.
• • •
The itch of algae being sun-dried onto his body finally woke him up. Nohar could feel the dried slime caking his fur in clumps all over his body. His tail had fallen asleep and had stuck to the outside of his right thigh. He had to reach up and help his eyelids to open against the gunk holding them together. Even that little movement sent aches up and down his arm.