Stephen Coonts - Combat

So we closed up the shop and I used my century-old key to get us past the kitchen door. I explained my conceit, keeping the upstairs part of the house turn-of-another-century except for a few sensible improvements: media center, smoke and particulate detectors, a deionizer built into a squat wooden 1920s icebox. I couldn’t recall whether I’d left any notes on my desk or screen downstairs, so I didn’t mention my setup there.

I showed Norm to the media center in my parlor, swore to him that the couch wouldn’t collapse, and left him with a holocube of the recent Sears Point Grand Prix. I’d be lying if I said I was worried about Quent, but while rustling up the corned beef, cheese, and other munchables necessary to a reuben I kept expecting him to call. I thought he might wind up his day by driving out, and we could all schmooze together. I thought wrong.

Just for the hell of it, I opened a bottle of Oregon early muscat for our sandwiches. A bit on the sweet side, but, to make a point, I reminded Norm that Catalonians serve it to special guests and I admired their style.

After supper we skimmed more holocubes and played some old CDs, and I was yarning about the time I had to evade a biker bunch when I heard my phone. It had to be Quent, I thought; and in a way it was. I said, “Sorry, you never know,” to Norm, went into the back bedroom, and answered.

It was Dana, terse and angry. “You won’t like this any better than I do,” she warned me, and asked where I was.

I told her, and added, “I sure don’t like it when I don’t know what’s up, boss lady. Tell me.”

She did, and a flush of prickly heat spread from the back of my neck down my arms. I only half heard the essentials, but every word would replay itself in my mind during my drive back to Richmond.

“Give me a half hour,” I said. “The Sonmiani rep is here with me. He might be some help tracing some of the crew’s movements if there’s a connection.”

“Say nothing tonight; Sonmiani might be one of those firms that demand advocacy no matter what.”

“Firms like yours,” I said grimly, and regretted it in the same moment. “Forgive me, I’m — I need to go out and slug a tree. See you in thirty.”

Norm must have been sensitive to body language because he stood up as I stumped through the parlor door. I told him I had to drive back into town as soon as I changed clothes. To his question I said it wasn’t anything he could help with; just a case that had taken a new turn. He asked whether my Korean boss let me go along on the Ras Ormara thing. I replied that there wasn’t much doubt I’d make it, and promised to give him an early-morning call. Then I hurried into my bedroom for a quick change, my hands shaking.

As I slapped the closures on my sneakers I heard the Porsche start up, and Norm was long gone when my tires hit country-road macadam. Not so long gone that I didn’t almost catch him nearing Concord. I hung back enough to let him find the freeway before me. After all, there wasn’t any need for breaking records now; hard driving was simply the only way I could use up all that adrenaline before I met the Feds off the freeway in East Richmond, near the foothills. I kept thinking that from downtown Richmond to some very steep ravines was only five minutes or so. And wondering whether my buddy Quent had still been alive during the trip.

Linked to Dana by phone, I found the location a block off the main drag, a long neon strip of used-car lots and commercial garages. Evidently Dana’s people had shooed the locals away, though a pair of uniformed cops still hung around waiting to control the nonexistent crowd, and I seemed to be it. The guys doing the real work wore identical, reversible dark jackets. I knew that “F B I” would be printed on the inner surfaces of those jacket backs and, when Dana waved me forward, a strobe flash made me blink.

I saw the chalk outline before I spotted the partially blanketed figure on a foldable gurney in the extrawide unmarked van. The chalk lines revealed that Quent had been found with his legs in the street, torso in the gutter, head and one arm up on the curb. The stain at the head oval looked black, but it wouldn’t in daylight.

We said nothing until I followed Dana into the van, sitting on jump seats barely out of the way of a forensics woman who was monitoring instruments while she murmured into her headset. The gadget she occasionally used looked like my StudyFrail but probably cost ten times as much. I leaned forward, saw the misshapen contours of a face I had known well. I knew better than to touch him. I think I moaned, “A www, Quent.”

“He was deceased before he struck the curb, if it’s any consolation,” said Dana. “Long enough before, that he lost very little blood on impact. Presumption is that someone dropped him from a moving vehicle.”

I couldn’t help wondering what I’d been doing at the time. Nodding toward the forensics tech, I managed to mutter, “Got a time of death?”

Dana said, “Ninety minutes, give or take.” I would’ve been licking my fingers right about then. “We thought it might have been accidental at first.”

“For about ten seconds,” said the tech dryly. She wasn’t missing anything. Her gloved hand lifted Quentin Kim’s lifeless wrist. It was abraded and bruised. She pointed delicately with her pinkie at the bluish fingertips. The nails of the smallest two fingers were missing. The cuticles around the other nails were swollen and rimmed with faint bloodstains, and the ends of the nails had been roughened as if chewed by some tiny animal. “He still had a heartbeat when this was done,” she added.

“Pliers,” I said, and she grunted assent. “Somebody wanted something out of him. But how could pulling out fingernails be lethal,” I asked, shuddering by reflex as I tried to imagine the agony of my close friend, a friend who had originally hired me for physical backup. Fat lot of good I had done him ….

The tech didn’t answer until she glanced at Dana, who nodded without a word. “Barring a coronary, it couldn’t. But repeated zaps of a hundred thousand volts will give you that coronary. Zappers that powerful are illegal, but I believe Indonesian riot control used them for a while. The fingernails told me to look for something else. Nipples, privates, lips, other sites densely packed with nerve endings.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. She was implying torture by people who were good at it, and I lacked the objectivity to view the evidence.

“But that’s not where I found the trauma,” said the tech. “It showed up as electrical burn marks in a half dozen places where a pair of contact points had been pressed at the base of the skull, under the hair. Not too hard to locate if you know what you’re looking for. The brain stem handles your most basic life support; breathing, that sort of thing. Electrocute it hard, several times, and it’s all over.”

“It’s not over,” I growled.

“It is for him,” the woman said, then looked into my eyes and blinked at whatever she saw. “Got it,” she mumbled, going back to her work.

“Under the circumstances,” Dana said, not unkindly, “you may want to break this one off without prejudice. Even though there may be no connection between this and the particular case you’re working. Quentin had other active cases, and we know he’s not above working two at once, don’t we?”

“I resent that word ‘above.’ We also know how we’d bet, if we were betting,” I said.

“You are betting, Rackham. And stakes don’t go much higher than this.”

Neither of us could have dreamed how wrong she was, but I could dream about avenging my pal. I said, “I’m feeling lucky. Where’s that Loc-8 with the analyzer? I’ll learn to use it by tomorrow. Maybe Norm Goldman can divert some people’s attention. He’ll be with me.”