Greg Rucka - Walking dead

"Mr. Twigg," the cop said, handing my license back to me, "kill your engine and exit the vehicle."

I unfastened the seatbelt, following his orders. "What'd I do?"

"You were driving erratically, sir. Have you had anything to drink?"

"Nothing but water."

"Turn around, hands on the vehicle."

"I didn't do anything."

"Turn around."

The other cop was drawing his weapon.

I turned around, put my hands up, and immediately found my right with a cuff around it. The cop who'd stopped me yanked my arm around, secured my wrists together behind my back. He gave me a quick patdown, then began maneuvering me toward his car. He had the door open to the rear seat when I tried again.

"I didn't do anything."

"Mr. Twigg," the cop said, "shut the fuck up." The second cop followed us, and we didn't go far, maybe half a mile from where I'd been pulled over, then off the freeway and into desert scrub. Both cars came to a stop, and the officer who'd pulled me over waited until his partner had exited his vehicle, then came around, and together they pulled me out of the back. We weren't so far from the interstate that I couldn't see the occasional light, hear the soft whisper of the traffic. The sky was clear and bright, and the moon had risen.

I was starting to get very worried. If their plan was to kill me, there wasn't going to be much I could do to prevent it. The only glimmer of hope I could find was, if that was their intention, they'd have taken me further from the road to do it.

"Ms. Downs asked us to give you a message." The one who'd pulled me over seemed to be doing all the talking.

"I think I've gotten it," I said.

They shoved me forward, hard, and I tried to keep my balance, but with the terrain and the force of the push, it was a lost cause. I managed to catch myself on my knees, started to turn my head back to them, and even though I was expecting it, even knowing it was coming, the pain of the blow exploded bright through my vision and sent me down on my side. The fleeting hope came and went that my glasses would somehow survive whatever happened next.

What happened next was a beating.

I tried to tuck up into a ball, to protect my left side and my right arm while both cops went at me using their sticks, but with my hands cuffed behind my back, there was no way to do it, and I was at their mercy. They worked my back and shoulders, hit me a couple of times in the head. My perception fractured, began dropping time. All I could do was lie there and take it.

After a while, they stopped. The one who did all the talking used a kick to flip me onto my back, then jabbed me in the sternum with his collapsible baton. I made yet another noise I wasn't proud of.

"It'd be a good idea," the cop said. "It'd be a very, very good idea for you to forget you ever came to New Paradise."

I groaned in agreement. He was making a lot of sense.

"You come back here, Mr. Twigg, and we'll have to have another talk with you," he said. "There's a lot of desert between here and Vegas. A lot of desert. It could be years before somebody found what was left of you. Are we clear?"

I tried to nod.

"Don't come back."

I tried to nod again.

He motioned for the other cop, and they rolled me onto my stomach, unfastened the cuffs. I didn't move, feeling fresh misery rush into my shoulders. One of them hit me in the back again, and then I heard them walking away, the sound of the car doors slamming closed on each patrol car. Their engines started, one after the other, and their tires ground the earth, then faded away into the night.

I rolled myself onto my back slowly, trying to guard my left side, checking the site of the knife wound with my fingertips. When I brought my fingers up to see them in the moonlight, I saw blood, but not a lot. Hopefully it was only a couple of torn stitches. I dropped my hand back to my side and just lay there, feeling the earth beneath me still hot from the day's sun, trying to get a grip on the pain, thinking.

Bella Downs had members of the New Paradise Police Department on her payroll. At five thousand dollars just to get through the door of her house of horrors, she certainly could afford it. A town the size of New Paradise, there couldn't be more than six, maybe eight cops on that force. It was possible she'd bought them all. That was her strength, how she guarded her home turf. Bradley and Mike inside, and the cops on speed dial should they ever be required.

She'd shown me her best cards, I realized, and I started to laugh, and kept on laughing, not caring how much it hurt, because I saw it then, saw what to do and the way to do it. Bella Downs didn't know who Matthew Twigg was, she couldn't be sure how I'd found her, and she didn't know what I really wanted. As far as she was concerned, I'd strayed off course and into her operation, and so she'd shown me her best cards to convince me to go away and not come back.

If I'd been a man named Matthew Twigg, I probably would've listened.

With effort, I pulled myself to my feet. The walk back to the rental was going to be a long and painful one, but I knew the car would still be there. The cops from New Paradise would make sure of that. The drive back to Vegas would be even longer, and probably hurt worse. But none of that mattered.

Tiasa was close, and I finally had a way to reach her.

Thirty-one There were three students at work in the RF lab at the Howard R. Hughes School of Electronics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when I walked in during lunch hour the next day. Of them, only one looked up, a young Hispanic man in wire-frame glasses and a Green Lantern T-shirt, apparently mid-process of assembling some piece of electronics or another.

"Dude," he said. "What happened to your face?"

"Lost a bet," I said.

"Some bet. Can I help you with something?"

"I'm looking for Sharala Chandna. Professor Blackstone gave me his name."

The other two at work-another man and a woman, each perhaps in their mid-twenties-broke off from their respective tasks, listening. The man was Caucasian, and the closest to the cliche I'd walked in expecting, despite myself, in black cargo pants and white work shirt, pens and a calculator in his breast pocket. The woman looked to be Indian, wearing torn and weathered jeans, and a faded light blue T-shirt with the words Big Blue Marble barely legible beneath an iron-on Planet Earth.

"That would be me." The woman pushed the laptop she'd been working at to the side. There was a decal on the lid of the computer, a caricature of a girl in horn-rim glasses with a mop of black hair. The words Flirty, Dirty, and Nerdy had been printed beneath.

"Beg your pardon," I said. "He led me to believe I was looking for a guy."

"Yeah, Blackie does that." Sharala Chandna nodded. "Likes to poke holes in the stereotypes. He tell you to look for the one with a pocket protector, too?"

"Nerd glasses, actually."

Sharala Chandna approached, leaving her workbench and her laptop behind. Various pieces of equipment that I hadn't the first idea about populated the workshop, along with circuit boards, spare antennae, soldering equipment, oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and tools of every shape and size. The two men went back to their respective projects, and I didn't even try discerning what they were working on.

Sharala looked me over, and I had a good idea what she was seeing, and so didn't take it personally. Aside from my jeans, T-shirt, and boots, I had a new selection of bruises, including a cheerfully swelling one rising quickly on my right cheek. My lower lip had been split at the corner. In my short sleeves, the bandage covering the stitches on my forearm was clearly visible.

"I'd offer to shake your hand, but I'm afraid it'd fall off," she said.