Max Collins - Before the Dawn

She trotted off toward Crash, where her bike waited, even as the dealer’s shoes hammered the concrete as he ran-limped as far away from her as possible, making hollow echoes in the night.

The next afternoon Max found Vogelsang camped behind his desk, stuffing an Oreo into his mouth.

“Health food?” she said, stepping from the shadows.

The big man jumped — he hadn’t heard her come in. His eyes shot from her toward the double doors and the front of the laundry where the Asian woman was supposed to screen his visitors.

“I found another way in,” she said.

“What the hell... what the hell you doing here?”

“Didn’t you pencil me in?” she asked, stepping up to the desk, arching an eyebrow. “You did say a thousand.”

“Yeah, so?”

She tossed a thick envelope onto his desk. He looked at it as if it might bite, then picked it up, juggled it once, twice. He looked in the envelope — it wasn’t sealed — and studied the thickness of green admiringly.

“That’s a thousand,” she said.

“It would seem to be.”

“Go ahead and count it.”

“Naw... I wouldn’t insult you.” He set the package of Oreos aside, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, and sat back in his chair. “Now... who is it you want me to find?”

“Two people.”

“But this is one thousand. What, are they together?”

She shook her head.

He cocked his bucket head and made the peace sign. “Max, that’s two cases... one, two.”

“Be that way,” she muttered, and reached for the wad of bills. “I’ll find somebody who likes my money.”

“Whoa, whoa — no need to go off like a little firecracker... I like your money just fine. I’ll take this as a down payment, if you understand with two cases, more time is obviously gonna be involved... and we’ll go from there.”

Max didn’t move for a long moment, then slowly relaxed and dropped into the chair behind her.

“Tell me about your two people,” Vogelsang said, the money disappearing into a desk drawer.

“First one is male — white, about my age, athletic, badass.”

“Distinguishing marks?”

She paused. “A barcode on the back of his neck.”

Vogelsang looked up. “A what?”

She repeated what she’d said, adding, “Just a funky tattoo... you know how it goes with us weird-ass kids.”

That seemed to answer it for Vogelsang, who began scrawling some notes. “Any idea where he is?”

“Here. Seattle.”

“It’s a big city.”

“And it’s your city, Mr. Vogelsang. That’s why I’m hiring you. If it was easy, I’d have found him by now.”

“Give me a more detailed description. More than just a badass with a barcode.”

She thought about that, then said, “Six-one, one-ninety maybe, dark hair... I think.”

Vogelsang’s eyes vanished into slits. “You think?”

“Saw him for ten seconds on a crappy video feed.”

She explained about what she’d seen on the news show, and that she thought she’d recognized a long-lost “relative.”

“Might be able to get that clip from somebody I know at SNN,” Vogelsang said, almost to himself. “He got a name, this long-lost relation?”

“Seth.”

“Last name?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know. He’d be using different ones. Maybe even different first names.”

Vogelsang studied the pad, then looked up at her. “Anything else? This is pretty slim.”

“The news story said he might be working with an underground journalist — Eyes Only?”

The detective’s eyes widened, and one of them twitched at the corner; he seemed to turn a whiter shade of pale. “Is that right...”

“Why? Is that gonna be a problem?”

The big man shrugged. “Could be. This Eyes Only guy, he’s on the g’s shit list. Politics make me nervous. Plus, this Eyes Only dude, he’s messed some people up... doesn’t like to be interfered with. Takes himself way too serious...”

Max offered the investigator a reassuring smile. “You find Seth, I’ll take care of Eyes Only... I’ll take the heat... if there’s a problem.”

Flipping a page in the notebook, Vogelsang said, “Okay — who’s missing person number two?”

Max sighed. “Afraid this is gonna be tough, too... maybe even tougher: a woman, Hannah, and that’s all the name I’ve got.”

“What does she look like?”

Max considered the private eye’s question, replayed that first night of freedom in her head. In her mind’s eye appeared a woman in her thirties with dishwater blond hair to her shoulders and wide-set blue eyes the color of a mountain stream... staring down at Max in her memory, as if the nine-year-old were still on that car floor.

She gave Vogelsang the description.

“Anything else?”

The Tahoe dived into a valley, then roared up beside Max, the tires sliding a little as the driver stomped on the brakes and locked them up. Max glimpsed the Wyoming plate, AGT 249, then the driver finally got control of the vehicle and pulled to a stop.

Max told him the license number.

“That’s it?”

“She may have been a nurse, or some other kind of medical personnel. Maybe for the federal government.”

Vogelsang wrote that down. He looked up, his smile friendly. “Okay... give me a week. You got a number?”

“Pager.” She gave him the number.

“Okay, Max — I’ll call when I’ve got something.”

“For a grand — you better.”

Outside the Sublime Laundry, Max hopped on the Ninja and headed for her crib. She felt both closer and farther from her sibs than she ever had.

Unless the media attention had spooked him, Seth was somewhere in this city, right now ...

In the meantime, while Vogelsang did his thing, she’d be doing hers, just fitting in with her new Jam Pony family.

Funny... in her brief time on the planet, Max had been part of... and lost... three different families. First the Manticore sibs, then the Barretts, and finally the Chinese Clan.

She’d been separated from her siblings by a strange confluence of force and circumstance; and fleeing Mr. Barrett had been self-defense.

Still, sometimes late at night... and tonight would be one of those... she felt a twinge of guilt for abandoning Lucy, and for running out on Moody and Fresca and the others.

She wondered if the Jam Pony bunch would be just as impermanent.

Two days ago, it had begun.

A quartet of Moody’s kids — ranging in age between fourteen and eighteen — had been cut down by sniper fire from the half-standing structure of the former Roosevelt Hotel. Two boys, two girls, shaken like the naughty children they were, were dropped in a mist of blood to the cracked cement squares where hands and feet of forgotten celebrities remained on pointless display.

Every attempt to leave the building, through whatever exit, had resulted in a hail of slugs flinging Moody’s people to the pavement in a sprawl of death. Pinned down like this — based upon the food and ammunition on hand — Moody and his crew couldn’t last longer than a week. But should be time enough to plan, to react effectively, even to wait for support from the city or the feds.

The youth of his clan, however, was a problem — even in a cavernous auditorium like that of the Chinese Theatre, a sense of claustrophobia could descend... that is, when you knew that stepping outside the building would end your life in echoing gunfire. Sandbags, furniture, crates, old theater seats, and anything else not nailed down had been arranged throughout the theater as little aboveground bunkers. Moody would move among them — floating like a silver-ponytailed shadow, a flowing black bathrobe loose over black T-shirt and jeans, for melodramatic effect — calming them with words and gestures, assuring them their fortress was impregnable.