Timothy Zahn - Odd Girl Out

Of course, the fact that she set the bail at half a million dollars might have implied not so much sympathy but a macabre sense of humor. She would have had my financials on the screen in front of her, and would have known I couldn't possibly raise that kind of cash.

Fortunately for me, I had a friend in New York who could.

He was there within the hour, arriving by autocab and no doubt striding in like he owned the place. Dressed in a severe dark blue business suit, his currently long hair link-curled in a tight conservative knot at the back of his collar, and with a set of enhancement glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, he would have looked like just another defense attorney pulling the night beat.

He was anything but. Bruce McMicking, a human chameleon who changed his appearance like most people changed music providers, was ex-Marine, ex-bounty hunter, and currently the top troubleshooter for multitrillionaire industrialist Larry Cecil Hardin.

He wasn't nearly as happy to see me as I was to see him. "I trust you realize how far I've stuck my neck out on this one," he said coldly as we walked down the precinct steps. "If Mr. Hardin gets even a whiff of this, there will be six counties of hell to pay."

"I know, and I'm sorry," I apologized. "But I didn't have anyone else to call."

"You need to make friends with a few more trillionaires."

"Oddly enough, I do know one besides Mr. Hardin," I told him. "But he's only a potential trillionaire at the moment. Probate's likely to take a while."

"Doesn't it always." He flagged down a passing autocab and ushered me inside. "This had better be good."

I waited until we were rolling, and then gave him a rundown of my evening. "Interesting," he commented thoughtfully when I'd finished. "What's your read?"

"The male vic was a walker, with at least one other walker present," I said. "They jumped Lorelei, but she got off the first shot and managed to plug one of them in the forehead. They got her with snoozers—"

"Which implies they wanted her alive," he put in.

"Right," I said. "After which—"

"So why did they then turn around and kill her?"

I frowned. With my brain still fatigue-fogged that question hadn't even occurred to me. "Maybe the Modhri realized that one walker couldn't get her away fast enough once her shot woke up the neighborhood," I said. "So he went for the draw instead and killed her."

McMicking shook his head. "I pulled the police report while they were processing you out. The witness said the incident started with a single shot—"

"Presumably Lorelei nailing the first walker."

"—but then that shot was followed by only a few seconds of silence before the barrage started."

I scratched my chin. A few seconds wasn't nearly enough time for a pair of snoozer rounds, an attempt to pick her up, the realization that that wasn't going to work, and settling for murder as Plan B. "How sure is the witness about the timing?"

"Very sure," McMicking said. "He was getting something out of the micro when the first shot sounded, and hadn't even gotten it to the table when he heard five or six more."

"The walker getting his polyp colony shredded."

"But again, the next gap wasn't very long," McMicking said. "No longer than it took him to set down his meal and hit the cop-call button on his comm. Another barrage, again consisting of five or six shots, and it was over."

Just long enough, in other words, for the second walker to turn around and mutilate Lorelei the same way. But not enough time for much of anything else. "Okay, so there was no time for an interrogation," I said. "But there might have been enough time for a quick theft."

"That was my read," McMicking said. "Only I'm guessing it was the walkers who shot first, with the snoozers, and that the woman then managed to get off her thudwumper round before she went under."

"I don't know," I said. "A pair of snoozers are going to take down a woman of her size awfully fast. She'd have been lucky to even get the gun out, let alone aim and fire."

"Unless she was like the man who died outside the New Pallas Towers eleven months ago when this whole thing started," McMicking said. "He had three snoozers and three thudwumpers in him and still managed to follow you there."

I gnawed at my lip. Earlier, I'd speculated that Lorelei might have been someone like me whom the Spiders had coopted into their war. It hadn't occurred to me that she might have been an even rarer avis, someone like my partner Bayta.

Especially since neither Bayta nor the Chahwyn had ever mentioned there being any more like her roaming the galaxy. "If she was, she could have saved herself a lot of grief if she'd just identified herself to me," I said.

"Maybe she wasn't allowed to," McMicking said. "Given all I don't know about this game, I do know the Spiders like to play their cards really close."

"No kidding," I said sourly.

"Speaking of Spiders and playing cards close, where's Bayta?"

"She's off riding the Quadrails somewhere," I told him. "On our last mission we ran into a large shipment of coral allegedly headed for Cimman space. She and the Spiders are trying to find out where it actually ended up."

McMicking grunted. "Good luck to them." He inclined his head microscopically toward the street behind our autocab. "So you think our tail is a friend of Lorelei's? Or have we found our missing walker?"

Even dead tired, I knew better than to spin around and peer out the rear window. "How long has he been there?" I asked.

"Since we left the precinct house," McMicking said. "Private car, Manhattan registry plate. There could be a second person in the car with him—hard to tell with the light and distance." He cocked an eyebrow. "The other interesting question would be which one of us they're following."

"My guess is it's you," I said. "I'm pretty much a known quantity. You're the mystery man." I cocked an eyebrow. "I mean, they know about Bruce McMicking, but they don't know about you , if you follow."

"Those official photos of me do tend to go out of date pretty fast," he agreed. "Of course, that assumes our friend is a walker and not some other unforgiving leftover from your past."

"Could be," I agreed. "Though I'm guessing you probably have as many of those leftovers as I do."

"Someday we'll sit down and compare notes," he said. "Any preference as to how we work this?"

I watched the streetlights flowing past. "Let's first try to find out which of us he's interested in."

Ten minutes later our autocab pulled to a halt by the curb in front of my apartment building. I hopped out, and as the vehicle pulled back into the sparse predawn traffic I strode quickly across the sidewalk and the thin sliver of open ground to my building's outer door.

No one opened fire before I made it inside, nor was there anyone lurking in the foyer. I skipped the elevator in favor of the stairs and headed up.

Midway up the first flight my comm vibrated in my pocket, and I pulled it out. "Compton."

"Looks like it's me," McMicking's voice came back. "The car didn't even slow down for you. Oh, and I got a clear look as we went around the corner. There are definitely two of them."

"Just doubles the fun of it all," I said. "Are they still following you?"

"Like the golden retriever I had as a kid."

"Good," I said, easing around the last corner of the final landing. There was no one lurking in the hall outside my apartment. "Give me ten minutes and then a two-buzz."

The first thing I did once I was inside was to retrieve my Glock and make sure its clip was loaded with snoozers. I tucked it into my belt, and then added a clip of thudwumpers too, just in case. Feeling marginally safer now that I was armed, I went to the kitchen.