Carrie Vaughn - After the Golden Age

Mark and Analise, in separate phone calls, told her that no judge would make her testify.

“They can’t do it,” Mark said with inspiring vehemence. “That’s ludicrous. If anything, you should be testifying for the prosecution. Why isn’t Bronson putting you on the stand?”

She couldn’t tell him. She just kept saying, “I don’t know,” and sounding scared. He threatened to rush to her office and take her home then and there, but she talked him out of it. He promised to bring her Thai food for supper instead.

When Analise offered to bring her supper, Celia had to turn her down. “Mark’s bringing food.”

“Hm, good for him. Wait a minute, he’s a cop. Can’t he make the judge keep you from testifying or something?”

“I don’t think it works like that. The DA’s already filed a protest. That’s all we can do.”

“They’ll listen to him, right?”

Wrong. All the defense had to do was present evidence that Celia wasn’t the squeaky-clean victim everybody thought she was, and the judge wouldn’t be able to wait to haul her onto the stand. But she couldn’t tell Analise that any more than she could tell Mark.

“I don’t know.” Feigned ignorance made a hell of a shield to hide behind.

She received her subpoena by courier that afternoon.

She felt grateful that she had work to bury herself in. City Hall had deeds and street plans going back far enough to track down Leyden Park. This was the part of her job she liked, hunting down the elusive clues, tracking her quarry, and pouncing on the target. Since she didn’t have superpowers, she had to settle for battling evil from behind a desk.

The Leyden Park building still existed, but it was vacant. It was located in an industrial neighborhood northeast of town, an area populated by oil refineries and chemical plants. A wasteland. No one would notice an empty warehouse building there. Demolishing it wasn’t worth the expense, since the demand for the land it was on was low. At least until now. The site was marked as one of the areas Mayor Paulson’s superhighway would pass through. His office had recently ordered surveys of the land.

Based on the date, the building had apparently been abandoned, written off as a capital loss and donated to the city, shortly after the accident that had put Sito in the hospital. All Celia had to do was find the original deed, and the original owner who’d hired Sito and sponsored the failed experiment. Never mind that the original deed seemed to be missing.

Celia went to the clerk and recorder’s office and talked to the front-line assistant. The woman looked harried, and Celia tried to be polite.

“I’m trying to trace an original title deed for the DA’s office. It’s for this property.” At least she’d been able to track down the address.

“Have you checked with records?”

“I just came from there. The information seems to be missing, and they thought you might have some other ideas.”

The woman heaved a long-suffering sigh. “It’s probably misfiled. Which means we may never find it … unless you feel like cleaning out the place?”

Celia liked digging for information, but not that much. “What about the property tax records? Even if we can’t find the deed, we should be able to find out who was paying property tax on the building back then, right?”

The woman brightened. “I think I can help you with that.”

In a back corner of the office sat an ancient microfiche machine and a row of filing cabinets. The woman chatted as she opened drawers and scanned file-folder tabs. “They put everything on microfiche about twenty years ago. Now they want everything on computer. Because no one can find the time or energy to transfer the microfiche to digital files, we have to keep both. You’re lucky you’re not trying to find something that got entered during the transition. Then, it could be anywhere.”

Celia waited patiently, but she tapped her foot.

The clerk thumbed through one of the file folders, then thumbed through again. “Hm. It should be right here—”

It was enough to make Celia think that someone had taken the data, that someone was hiding something.

“Oh, here it is!” The clerk pulled a folder from a file bin on top of the cabinet, near the machines. “Someone else was looking at it and didn’t get around to putting it back. Ah, that’s why.”

She showed Celia the label on the file folder, which read CITY URBAN RENEWAL. “That building of yours must be in one of the areas they want to put the highway through. The mayor’s people are in here all the time looking up property assessments. I’ll find your building in a minute.”

She sat down at the reader with a sheet of microfilm and started searching. While grateful for the clerk’s helpfulness, Celia almost offered to work the machine herself; bringing the little squares of film into focus was taking forever.

“There it is,” the woman finally said. She pressed a button, and the machine’s printer whirred and spat out a sheet of paper. The clerk handed the page over proudly.

Celia studied it. She had to read it three times, convinced her eyes weren’t focusing right. There was the right property, Leyden Industrial Park, and the right address, and this was the data for the year that Sito’s accident had happened. Everything was right.

West Corp had paid the site’s property tax for that year.

THIRTY laps. She could swim thirty laps without thinking about it. It would wear her out enough to make sure she slept well that night without exhausting her. Then she wouldn’t lie awake dreading impending testimony that was still a week away, at least.

She was going to be swimming a lot of laps in the foreseeable future.

By the end of the session, she had the pool to herself, which was nice. The only noises were hers, and if she didn’t see anyone spitting she could pretend like the water really was clean.

The lifeguard had stepped away for a moment. He knew her as a regular, knew she wasn’t likely to suddenly drown, and must have taken the opportunity for a break while no one else was around. She could pretend she had the whole building to herself.

When she found the locker room empty as well, her neck prickled. Closing wasn’t for another three hours. She’d have heard any announcements in that regard over the PA. She pulled her towel tightly around her, skipping the showers, and going straight to the lockers. She could shower at home. She wanted to get out of here.

Three men in ski masks were waiting for her, standing by the bank of bright orange lockers, terribly out of place. She didn’t scream, didn’t panic. Just turned around and walked out again.

A fourth man blocked the passage that led to the pool.

This is not happening. Even worse than getting kidnapped was getting kidnapped soaking wet, wearing only a swimsuit.

The men closed in, moving toward her from either side. Two of them held handguns. She hadn’t noticed the weapons at first; they were black and blended in with the gloves and jackets.

She looked for anything that might double as a weapon. The hand dryers were heavy enough to clock someone, but were bolted to the wall. She could break the mirror, use a shard as a knife. And what would she use to break the mirror, her elbow? Action-hero Celia?

If they just wanted to kill her, they’d have shot her already and it would have only taken one of them. She just had to take a deep breath and wait for rescue. Again.

The subtle, gurgling noise was barely noticeable—it might have been a shower left running. But the kidnapper in front of her took a step, and his boot splashed. He was standing in an inch of water. It lapped over Celia’s toes, and was pouring in faster. The floor outside the row of shower stalls had a drain in it. The locker area had two more drains. Water started backing up from all of them.