“Liar!” Nohar’s mouth dried up when he heard the hammer cock. “You’re all with them. I watched one of you kill him.”
Young was off his nut, but at least Nohar realized what he must be talking about. “A moreau could have killed Derry and I never would have heard about it. Why don’t you put down the gun and we can talk.”
Young looked back at the boxes he’d been dousing. “You understand, I can’t let anyone find out.”
Nohar was lost again. “Sure, I understand.”
“Derry didn’t know he was helping them—what they were. When he found out, he was going to stop. You realize that.”
Young was still looking into the garage, Nohar took the opportunity to take a few steps toward him. “Of course, no one could hold that against him.”
Young whipped around, waving the gun. “That’s just it! They’ll blame Derry. People would say he was working for them—”
Young rambled, paying little attention to Nohar. Nohar worked his way a little closer. He could see into the garage better now. His eyes watered and it was hard to read, but he could see some of the boxes of paper were filled with printouts. They looked like payroll records. One suitcase was filed with ramcards.
Young suddenly became aware of him again. “Stop right there.”
Young’s finger tightened and Nohar froze. “Why did ‘they’ kill Derry?”
The gun was pointed straight at Nohar as Young spoke. “He found out about them. He went over the finance records and figured it out.”
“You’re the finance chairman. Why didn’t you figure it out first?”
Mistake. Young started shaking and yelling something inarticulate. Nohar turned and dived at the ground.
Young fired.
Young screamed.
Nohar was looking away from the garage when the gun went off. He heard the crack of the revolver, immediately followed by a whoosh that made his eardrums pop. The bullet felt like a hammer blow in his left shoulder. The explosion followed, a burning hand that slammed him into the ground. The acrid smoke made his nose burn. The odor of his own burning fur made him gag.
Young was still screaming.
The explosion gave way to a crackling fire and the rustle of raining debris. Nohar rolled on to his back to put out his burning fur. When he did so, he wrenched his shoulder, sending a dagger of pain straight through his neck.
He blacked out.
• • •
The absolute worst smell Nohar could imagine was the smell of hospital disinfectant. As soon as he had gained a slight awareness of his surroundings, that chemical odor awakened him the rest of the way. Before he had even opened his eyes, he could feel his stomach tightening.
“Someone, open a window!” It came out in barely a whisper.
Someone was there and Nohar could hear the window whoosh open. The stale city air let him breathe again. Nohar opened his eyes.
It was what he’d been afraid of. He was in a hospital. It was in the cheap adjustable bed, the awful disinfectant smell, the thin sheets, and the linoleum tile. It was in the odor of blood and shit the chemicals tried to hide. It was in the plastic curtains that pretended to give some privacy to the naked moreys lined up, in their beds, like cattle in a slaughterhouse.
Nohar hated hospitals.
Nohar turned his head and saw, standing next to the window, Detective Irwin Harsk. The pink was as stone-faced as ever.
“Am I under arrest?”
Harsk looked annoyed. “You are a paranoid bastard. Young blew up, you’re allegedly an innocent bystander. Believe it or not, we found two witnesses that agree on two things in ten. Give me some credit for brains.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here because you’re giving me problems downtown. I’m supposed to be some morey expert. They expect me to exercise some control over you. I don’t like jurisdictional problems. I don’t like the DEA staking out half of my territory. I don’t like the Fed. And I don’t like outsiders pressuring me to bottle something up. I don’t like Binder. I don’t like Binder’s friends—”
Nohar struggled to get into a sitting position and his shoulder didn’t seem to object. “What?”
“A bunch of people who think they’re cops are trying to dick me around. They want me to keep you away from Binder’s people, or bad things will happen. Like what, I don’t know. I’m already as low as you get in this town.” Harsk slammed his fist into the side of the window frame. “Hell, Shaker’s screwing around the Johnson killing for Binder. They deserve you.”
Harsk looked like he needed to strangle someone. For once, Nohar was speechless.
“Look,” Harsk said, “I’m not going to do their shit-work for them. But you’re on your own lookout. I just want to avoid the bullshit and do what someone once laughingly described as my job.” Harsk walked to the door and paused. “One more thing. The DEA has a serious red flag on your ass.”
With that, Harsk left.
Nohar watched Harsk weave his way between the moreys, and didn’t know what to think. He’d always pictured Harsk as constantly dreaming up new ways to screw him over. Maybe Harsk was right. He was paranoid.
He felt his shoulder. The wound didn’t seem to be major. The dressing extended to the back of his neck, which felt tender when Nohar pressed it. He pulled back the sheet. There were five or six dressings on his tail. That, and a transparent support bandage on his slightly swollen right knee, was the only visible damage.
Considering how close he was to Young when the nut blew himself up, he’d gotten off light.
“Damn it.” Nohar suddenly remembered Cat. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, and Cat only had half a day’s food in his bowl when Nohar left.
He looked up and down the ward. No doctors, no nurses, not even a janitor. Harsk had been the only pink down here and he had already left. Nohar knew when, or if, hospital administration finally got to him, there would be a few hours of forms to fill out. Just to keep the bureaucracy happy.
To hell with that.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and gently started putting pressure on his right leg. It wasn’t a bad sprain. It held his weight. He stood up slowly and felt slightly dizzy. He was alarmed until he realized it was still from that damn disinfectant smell. Breathing through his mouth helped.
There was a window between his bed and the next one. The fuzzy nocturnal view—Nohar wished he could kill the lights in the ward so he could see better—of the skyline told him he wasn’t far enough down the Midtown Corridor to be at the Clinic. That meant he was at University Hospitals and only a few blocks from Moreytown. He was probably in the new veterinary building.
Lightning flashed on the horizon.
Nohar looked at the bed on the other side of the window. In it was a canine who had an arm shaved naked inside a transparent cast. He—like Nohar, the canine was naked and not covered by a sheet—was watching Nohar’s activity with some interest. The canine spoke when he saw he’d caught Nohar’s attention.
“You blow up?”
It was hard placing the accent, but defiantly first generation. Probably Southeast Asian. Nohar began looking for exit signs as he answered.
“Yes.”
“Pink law’s bad news. Best eye yourself, tigerman—”
Nohar was barely listening. He’d located the exit. “Sure. You have the date?”
“Fade side of August two. Saturday is five minutes from nirvana.”
Thirty-six hours. He must have been drugged.
That was it. He was leaving.
The canine was still nattering. Nohar thanked him and started toward the exit. Most of the moreys here were asleep, but a few watched him leave. There were a few comments, mostly of the “Skip on the pinks” variety. He did get one sexual proposition, but he didn’t pause enough to register the species or the gender the off
er came from.
He slipped out of the wardroom, the glass doors sliding aside as he passed, and found himself in a carpeted reception area. There was a waiting room, and a nurse’s station across from it. No one in sight. The elevators and the stairs were directly across from the doors to the ward. All he needed to do was cross between the station and the waiting room. Once in the stairwell he could make it to the parking garage.
He limped across no-man’s-land and nearly made it to the stairwell.
The elevator doors opened without any warning. He was caught right in front of the elevator. If it hadn’t been so damn silent, he might have had a chance to duck to the side.
The last person he expected to see in the elevator was Stephie Weir.
As the doors opened, she took a step forward and her motion ceased. Nohar thought he must have looked as surprised as she did. Neither of them moved. They stood there, staring at each other, until the doors started closing again.
Realizing he was about to blow his escape, Nohar jumped into the elevator. He called out, “Down. Garage level,” and pressed the button for the garage level just in case the thing didn’t have a voice pickup. Nohar hoped no one else in the building would want to use this particular elevator in the next half-minute.
Stephie was staring at him. Nohar waited until he felt the car moving downward, then he asked, “What are you doing here?”
The question seemed to break her out of shock. She lifted her gaze. “I want to know what happened to Phil. I was waiting down there two hours until Detective Harsk—Christ, what are you doing with no clothes on?”
That damned pink fetish. “Avoiding bureaucracy.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You’re naked!”
“Not until they shave me.”
The doors on the elevator opened and Nohar held his breath. They had made it all the way to the garage. Again, no one in sight.
Nohar turned to Stephie who looked and smelled of confusion. “If you want to talk about what happened, you better come with me.”
He stepped out on to the cold concrete. He finally felt comfortable breathing through his nose. The only strong smells down here were the slight ozone smell from the cars, and Stephie’s smoky-rose scent.
She choked back a few monosyllables and started walking after him. “Just tell me why, please.”
He almost gave her a curt answer, but he decided she deserved something of an explanation. “I need to get back home. Checking out and getting whatever the explosion left of my clothes could take a long while, and they might just decide they want to keep me for a day or two. Besides, I hate filling out forms. They can bill me.”
“What’s so important?”
“I don’t have anyone to feed my cat.”
That got her. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
Nohar shrugged and started toward the entrance of the parking garage. His claws clicked on the concrete.
She called after him. “Where’s your car?”
“I suppose it’s still parked outside my office.”
“You’re going to—” She paused. “Of course you intend to walk home like that. Come back here. At least let me give you a lift so you won’t get arrested.”
Nohar turned around. He didn’t know what to make of the offer. “Can I fit in your car?”
“A Plymouth Antaeus? What it cost, you better fit.”
“Sure you want to do this? My neighborhood—”
“Screw your neighborhood. We need to talk about Phil.”
Nohar silently agreed they needed to talk about Phil. He allowed himself to be led to the brand-new Antaeus.
Chapter 8
The Antaeus pulled up behind the Jerboa, splashing a deep puddle by the curb. The barriers prevented Stephie from driving any closer to Nohar’s apartment.
When Stephie parked, she turned to face Nohar. She seemed to be making an effort to keep her gaze fixed on his face. “It doesn’t sound like Phil.”
“It’s what happened.”
“The cops called it a suicide. Detective Harsk said Phil shot you.”
Nohar reached up and rubbed his left shoulder. “Can you explain what happened?”
Stephie turned toward the windshield, shaking her head. She was silent for a few seconds. Finally she said, “He bought that house so he could have a separate address.”
So, it was a sham. “He lived with Johnson?”
“Five years now.” She still looked out the window. A street lamp shone through the cascading rain and carved rippling shadows on her face. She spoke slowly and deliberately. “I can’t believe Phil would kill himself.”
Nevertheless, that’s what Young had done, as surely as if he had pointed the gun at his own head. Nohar could still picture Young saying they all—Nohar presumed Young meant moreys—were with them. Nohar suspected they were in MLI.
“How’d he feel about moreys?”
“I don’t know—” Very few people do, thought Nohar. “I didn’t talk to him much. I knew him mostly through talking to Derry.” She sighed. The sound seemed to catch in her throat.
After an uncomfortable pause, she changed the subject. “I don’t think Derry’s death would make him. . . .”
“What would it take?”
“More, just . . . more.” Stephie turned and looked Nohar in the eyes. Her expression seemed to show bewilderment and she smelled of fear, nerves, and confusion. “Do you think I’m a bad person?”
What the hell brought that on? “Of course not, why?”
“I feel terrible about what I said about Phil snubbing the funeral—”
Nohar restrained the immediate impulse to ask her why she was telling him that. Instead, he tried a close-lipped smile. “We all say things we end up regretting. It doesn’t mean we’re thoughtless.”
“It’s not just that. My whole life has been a hypocrisy—”
“You don’t mean—”
“I know exactly what I mean. I never even was a Binder supporter—I despise the man.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “Me, Phil, and Derry—we were all playing the twisted charade. All of us hiding because Binder was signing our paychecks.”
“What were you hiding?”
The look in her eyes changed for a moment. Nohar felt like he had let his mouth make a major mistake again. Instead, she smiled, even let out a little laugh.
“I was hiding myself, I guess.”
Nohar realized he was only going to get that cryptic comment. He nodded and opened the rear door to let himself out into the rain. The damp soaked into his fur in a matter of seconds.
“Thanks for the ride.” Nohar didn’t know why he felt obliged, but he added, “I’ll give you a call later on, if I find out anything.”
Nohar shut the door and she looked like she still couldn’t quite believe he was going to walk home without any clothes. “Nohar?”
He paused and looked back into the Antaeus. “Yes?”
“Forget it, never mind . . .”
She shook her head and drove the Antaeus into the darkness without an explanation.
Nohar stood and watched it go for a while, wondering.
Moreytown pressed around him. He had three blocks to go, so he started walking. He was safe from the cops here. Moreys were so casual about clothing that trying to enforce pink exposure laws in Moreytown would be impossible. His lack of attire would only be noted because of the rain, and the time of night. Now all he had to worry about were how many eyes had seen him with the pink female.
He nearly made it home—
A ratboy bumped into him.
No, they wouldn’t be that stupid.
He was on the wrong side of the street. He was between the abandoned bus and a boarded-up pizzeria. His usual alertness had failed him, and he realized the hospital smell was still clogging his nose.
> The familiar-looking ratboy, brown fur and denim cutoffs, rebounded from Nohar’s side. “Lookee—”
Now Nohar could catch the rat’s musk. The ratboy was flying a wave of excitement, reeked of it. It was Fearless Leader, and he was jacked about as far as a rat could go.
“The stray just ruffled my fur!”
Footsteps, two sets one end of the bus, two at the other. Subordinates. From the look and smell of it, Feareless’ boys were jacked worse than he was. Bigboy was there, and he snicked a blade. Nohar should have taken the knife when he had the chance.
Bigboy made a few ineffective waves with his switchblade. “Let’s shave the kitty pink.”
A chain rattled from the other end of the bus. “Teach some respect for the coat.”
Great, they were stupid.
So much for the Finger of God.
Fearless Leader pulled a gun, a twenty-two. Fortunately, he wasn’t doused in gasoline. “We don’t like pink moreys. We goina mark you. You move and we veto your pretty kitty ass.”
Nohar always held his fighting instinct under iron control. Both nature and the Indian gene-techs had designed his strain for combat, for hunting, for the spilling of blood. Almost always, that part of his soul was at odds with his conscious mind. Nohar thought of it as The Beast.
When Fearless pulled the gun, Nohar felt a shock of adrenaline. His heart began to pound and he felt the rush in his ears and his temples. There as the anticipatory taste of copper in his mouth. His breath like a blast furnace in the back of his throat.
The Beast wanted out. It was scratching at the mental door Nohar always kept locked.
Nohar opened the door and let The Beast take over.
The night snapped into razor-sharp monochrome. The smells erupted into a vivid melange. He could hear the ratboy’s heartbeat as well as his own. Time crawled.
The Beast roared.
Nohar roared. The sound bore no trace of his speaking voice. It was a scream of rage that tore the skin from his throat. The ratboys hesitated at the sound. Fearless smelled of fear now, fear that told Nohar he had never seen a morey turn wild before.