Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“I trust you with my back. What the hell is with the dance-around today, eh?”

A moment’s quiet assessment before he drops his gaze and scratches behind his right ear, gold hoops sparkling in the light. “Shit, Maker. S’weird, I dunno. Cops in my end of town, cops getting killed in my town. Looking for a dealer that I can’t find and they can’t find… just damned weird.”

My eyebrow tries to crawl up into my hairline. The basketball thumps the asphalt driveway. “What was that again?”

He starts reassembling the gun. “Just what I said. Me and the boys have been looking all week, and nothing. Nobody knows nothing. The guys that sold the shit, they from out of town, and the word is they went right back wherever the hell they come from. They were trying to move in, I could do something.”

I’ve a pretty good idea what Face’s “something” might entail, but I nod anyway. “Any idea where they were from?”

“I think from the City.”

Only one city in this part of the world is the capital-C variety. “Ah.” I run my tongue across my teeth. Silence hangs between us for a moment, and I think about the odd standoffishness in his manner today. He won’t look up and meet my eyes, and it takes a little while to make sense of why. “Razorface, are you worried for me?”

“You got somebody looking for you.”

“I know.” I wince as I hear my own tone, but I can’t make myself soften it — a dog that can’t stop growling over a bone.

“You got some kind of trouble?”

I move away from the porch railing, walking the length of the rickety structure. I stand there for a moment, watching the basketball game. The older boy is pretty much slaughtering the younger one, and frustration shines behind the sweat dripping down the smaller kid’s face. I know the feeling. “I’ve always got some kind of trouble.”

He laughs. “You living in the world, ain’tcha? Family trouble or other kind of trouble?”

“I haven’t got any family, Face.” I turn back over my left shoulder to look at him. He’s black-and-white out of my bad eye, the reassembled automatic in his hand picked out in red by the targeting scope.

Standing, he drops the pistol into a shoulder holster and shrugs it on. He used to shove it into his waistband until I told him a story about a guy I knew in the army who shot his balls off doing that. Standing there in the shade of the porch on a bright September day, I abruptly remember him as a skinny preadolescent, blood running down his soot-covered face from a glancing wound on his forehead. It’s so vivid an image I can almost smell the smoke.

Those were bad years, in the thirties when things in the States were even worse than they are now. My first time in Hartford, I wore a baby-blue peacekeeper beret and thought I was invincible. South Africa didn’t happen until two years later.

No, I really don’t have any idea why I came back here to retire. Must be the fond memories. I’m so wrapped up in them I miss the first part of his sentence when he speaks again.

“… gonna tell me what’s going on with you so I can help, or you gonna keep playing your cards in your vest pocket?” He comes up and lays a baseball glove mitt on my shoulder.

“I…” It’s an old habit, Face. What they don’t know can’t hurt me. I change the subject. “This cop. You never said if you knew anything.”

“Course I don’t know nothing. I know something maybe you don’t, though. This Duclose. Mashaya. She was my baby’s momma’s little sister.”

His baby’s momma. That could be any of twenty women. The implications come clear. “She’s from the neighborhood. A cop.”

“South Arsenal neighborhood. Got her high school and everything. Family’s from Trinidad. Good kid, they said.”

“So that’s why she was on this end of town. You think maybe what she got killed for wasn’t related to her job?” I notice I still have half a sandwich in my hand and take another bite. Leesie hates it when people don’t finish what she fixes.

His hand slips off my shoulder. “Some people don’t be so happy when some bitch from the neighborhood grows up to be a pig, if that’s what you mean. They might do something about it. But I would’ve heard ’bout that. This wasn’t no local issue.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs. “Mashaya, she had friends here. Nobody downtown cares if a few bangers OD.” He goes silent, and I know he’s thinking of Merc.

“You’re saying she was working on her own time.”

“It ain’t a crime unless white people or rich people die. She talked to a lot of people. Talked to me. Maybe got close to something.” His hands windmill slightly as he struggles to articulate his thoughts. “Somebody saw her get shot. Sniper bullet, one shot. Tore the back of her head clean off. White van came around the corner thirty seconds later and five guys cleaned up the scene and were gone before my boys even heard about the shooting. That’s fast.”

I start to see the outline of the picture he is painting for me, in his awkward way. Face isn’t stupid. He’s keen as the razor blade he keeps in his pants pocket. I’ve seen the man in a ten-thousand-dollar sharkskin suit cut to fit like a second skin, and you don’t get to be what he is if you’re not smart enough to remember the names and family histories of every petty criminal in the city.

Oral communication, however, is not his strong point. I finish the end of my sandwich as an excuse to think. “That’s professional . You’ve got a feeling about this,” I say at last.

“I got nothing but feelings, and they all making my knuckles itch. But I think we talk to the people Mashaya was talking to, we get close to the people she got close to…”

“We get shot in the head with a high-powered rifle and our bodies turn up in the river. Good plan, Razorface.”

He shrugged. “Actually, I was thinking of going on down to New York City. What do you say?”

I wipe my hands on my pants, leaving behind a greasy mayonnaise stain.

“I’ll drive.”

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Evening, Friday 8 September, 2062

The door to Gabe Castaign’s office stood open on the gray-carpeted hallway, and Elspeth paused there. She heard his voice, carefully cheerful, the enunciated tones telling her that he was speaking to a machine. “… hope you’re out having a hot date on a Friday night, or at least down at that dive you call a corner pub watching the game. My money’s on Chelsea. Call me. Bye!” She rapped the door sharply and stepped into the room just as he tapped the disconnect. The fuzzy image hanging in the air over his phone dissolved into transparency. How odd — whoever he was calling still has the factory message up. “Gabe?”

He was already looking up to greet her knock. “Elspeth. Come in please.” He stood and came around the big desk, a mirror of her own, scooping a pile of manuals off the seat of the upholstered chair to his right. “What can I do for you?”

She stepped onto soft carpeting identical to that in her own office, except in a masculine medium gray blue, complemented by periwinkle drapes. He’d hauled them to the side and turned off the projected babbling-brook landscape, revealing a less-than-enticing view of slanting sunlight across a well-stocked parking lot. A breeze ruffled the curtains; Elspeth smelled warm concrete. She hadn’t realized the windows would open. “I was hoping you were settled in and we could sit down and talk about the project.”

“I’d like that. Pull up a chair.” He set the manuals on the edge of his desk, away from the interface plate, and gestured to the one he’d cleared. The skin of his hands showed faint irregularities of color, speaking to Elspeth of old deep burns or something else requiring skin grafts.