Dirty Job Read online

  “You may have a cookie, Kit,” Nanny B quacked, “as your reward for calming down.”

  “Awesome,” Kit coughed, struggling to his feet.

  Then Mia started to cry. “It’s not fair! He gets everything he wants! I never get anything I want!”

  Irene and Rex reached for her, assuring her that they loved both children equally. “You can have a cookie, too,” Irene said, sitting Mia on her lap. She rested her cheek on top of her daughter’s head. Their blonde hair mingled. “Heck, you might as well have three. No one’s going to get supper at this rate.”

  I cleared my throat. Rex looked up at me. “So you see how it is, Mike,” he rumbled.

  I nodded, understanding what he meant. They would now need to start buying Kit horrendously expensive anti-seizure meds. Then after a while, they’d need to provide round-the-clock care. Eventually he would need to go to hospice. None of that came cheap.

  At least I could reassure Rex on one point. “We got the Mittel Trevoyvox cargo.”

  That brought a smile to his tired face. “Way to go.”

  “They want us to fly immediately.”

  “Mommy’s going away again,” Mia wept through a mouthful of cookie. “Mommy’s going away.”

  Irene placed her hands on Rex’s shoulders, and lowered her forehead to touch his, with the two children in between them. “This’ll be the last time, Mia,” she muttered. “We’re gonna be rich. We’ll have a car. A big house on the Cape. Heck—heck, if you really want it, we’ll even have a swimming pool.” Tears glistened on her eyelashes.

  I backed out and closed the door quietly behind me.

  8

  Back downstairs, I wandered through my empty apartment. It was really empty—no carpets, no curtains, no appliances, no furniture except the kitchen table and chairs. Nothing left for me to hang my humanity on. Lucy and I had begun redecorating, but we hadn’t got far. I smiled sadly at the smeary hot pink and turquoise paint job she had inflicted on her bedroom walls. I missed her already.

  I collected my infrared paint stripper and sander from the living-room. In my bedroom, I reloaded my .22 and stuck it into my waistband. In the kitchen, I splashed bourbon into a mug that still held an inch of this morning’s coffee. Sitting at the kitchen table, I called Robbie.

  “Yessir?” Holo signs shimmered behind his crewcut head, and passersby blurred in the background.

  “Out on the town?”

  “No sir. I was at rugby practice. What’s up?”

  Robbie Wolfe was my new admin officer. I had hired him in a hurry after our former admin, Kimmie Ng, was murdered. I’d wanted a mainstream human, not another Shifter, but Robbie had turned out to be a good hire. As his name suggested, he was a wolf, and he knew a lot of other young wolves from Smith’s End.

  “Come over to my place,” I said. “Whenever you can get here.”

  I took my tools and my drink outside. The roar of traffic made the night sound huge and hollow, like a seashell. At the Shoreside end of our street, the lights of the Strip pulsated, silhouetting the roofs against an inconstant, feverish glow.

  I stripped off the paint where the graffiti had been. The infrared stripper was silent, and took off the top layer so cleanly that I didn’t even need to scrape it by hand. I then sanded the area. It turned out that our building, which was now yellow, used to be blue, and before that, brick-red. It was over a hundred years old. First came the colonial spreads; then came the townhouses, like this one, all now split up into two, three, or even four apartments: then came the rowhouses further south, as the population of Shiftertown grew, and grew, and grew. It was not healthy. Shifters were never meant to live on top of each other like this. No wonder our “community” had disintegrated into rival cliques and gangs. I had been kidding myself if I thought Parsec’s arrest would put the brakes on that. It was systemic.

  A built, bulletheaded youth in a skin-tight t-shirt loped up the street and climbed my steps. “‘Lo, sir. What are you doing?”

  “Hi, Robbie. It may look as if I’m drinking, but I’m actually sanding.”

  He laughed. “How did Lucy take to that camp place?”

  “Like a duck to water. You got the automatic payments set up?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Cancel the autopay for Mia. She’s not attending, as it turns out. We’ll lose the deposit; too bad. Beer’s in the cooler.”

  Robbie went inside, came back out with a beer, and finally asked why I was sanding my front porch, in the dark.

  “You can’t see it anymore,” I said. “But one of those goddamn bears graffitied the house. You know him? Nunak.”

  Robbie shook his head.

  I did not tell him what Nunak had written. The prejudice against snitches is especially strong in Smith’s End. I put down my sander and took a drink from my mug. “It worries me, to be honest. They thought it was safe to walk up to my house, in broad daylight, and spray paint all over my porch. If they did that, what are they going to do next? Are they gonna break in? Jack my truck? What? They’ve got a grudge against me—against my whole crew—for putting Parsec in jail, and it’s now abundantly fucking clear that they aren’t going to let it lie.”

  Robbie blew out breath with a brrrr sound. “I could find out where this Nunak guy lives.”

  “I don’t want to take the offensive. No need to stir them up even more. But what I want you to do is move in here while we’re away.” I let that sink in for a moment. “Rex is tough, sure. But he’s gonna be looking after two kids. He’s in a more vulnerable position than I like. And Nanny B does not have claws or teeth.”

  The mild joke failed to lift the stricken expression on Robbie’s face. “I thought I was coming with you!”

  I sighed. I’d known it was going to be tough to break it to him, but the decision, which had been percolating in my mind, was now set. “Not this time. We’ve only got a single cargo, and the buyer is a Hurtworlds Authority trustee, so the paperwork is no big deal. Dolph and I can do it.”

  “Let me guess,” he said, trying to make light of it. “You don’t think I can handle myself on the Hurtworlds.”

  In all honesty, that was part of it. He may be a seasoned street fighter, but he was untested off-planet. I didn’t want to have to tell his mother that I lost her eldest on Mittel Trevoyvox or Yesanyase Skont.

  But the real reason was precisely the admin paperwork. We would be faking it. Robbie still thought Uni-Ex Shipping was on the up and up. I didn’t want him to find out that he worked for a dirty outfit. Not yet, anyway.

  “I know you can handle yourself,” I said. “That’s why I want you to stay here. Personally, I’d rather face every criminal in the Hurtworlds than the Bad-News Bears.”

  Once again, my lame attempt at humor failed to soften the blow. He paced around the porch and came back. “I thought I was supposed to be the admin officer, not security. Why did I even bother getting my certification? Don’t need to be a certified accountant to sit on the stoop and growl at passing bears.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “what planet are you living on, son? This has been a security gig from the get-go. You gotta be certified, to satisfy regulations, but I didn’t hire you for your brains. I hired you because you can fight. Here, or out in the Cluster, it’s the same thing.”

  “You told me to stay off the street,” he muttered.

  “That’s right. I do not approve of the so-called ripper scene. You don’t fight for micropayments anymore. Now you fight for me.”

  I picked up my sander and went back to work. After a minute, Robbie said, “Guess I should go home and get my stuff, then.”

  I smiled at him. “No need to start tonight. I’m still here. Start tomorrow, after we launch.”

  “Got it, sir.”

  “Oh, and Robbie?” I called him back as he started down the steps. “You can bring some other people if you like. If any of your friends need a place to crash, that’s fine, as long as they don’t wreck my expensive furniture or my fancy entertainment cente
r.”

  He laughed at that, knowing my apartment was an empty cave. “See you tomorrow, sir.”

  After he left, I finished the sanding. Then I went inside and triple-locked the door.

  I switched off all the lights. I sat in the living-room, on plastic sheeting, because I had no fucking furniture, and drank.

  Until the doorbell rang.

  9

  The sound of the doorbell made me jump like a gunshot. Clumsily, half-cut, I stood up and tiptoed out to the hall with my .22 in my hand. I poked the mirror on the wall. It was part of my new home security system, the first thing I had bought after MF’s purge of the apartment.

  The mirror turned into a screen displaying the feed from my front porch camera. There stood Jose-Maria d’Alencon of the PdL PD.

  Panic knotted my guts. Wouldn’t you know it. Wouldn’t you fucking know it. We thought we’d been so clever. So discreet. But the police know everything, They see everything. Why, why, why had I thought we could get away with murder on Ponce de Leon?

  At the same time, rationality pointed out that d’Alencon was alone. He was not even in uniform. If he was here to arrest me, this was an interesting departure from procedure.

  He rang the doorbell again.

  I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t home. That would only make me look guilty.

  “Just a minute,” I said to the screen. I hurried into my bedroom and hid the .22 in the closet. It is not illegal to possess firearms on Ponce de Leon, only to buy and sell them. All the same, it would look bad to answer the door with a naked weapon in my hand. I glanced automatically around the room for any incriminating evidence—evidence of what? The only thing I really needed to hide was inside my head, gnawing away at my brain.

  I opened the door before d’Alencon could ring again. “Hi, Bones. How’s it going?”

  It had been raining. In summer, we get a shower every night at 9 PM. You can set your clock by it. The gravelnuts and the roof of the porch were still dripping, and raindrops dotted the shoulders of d’Alencon’s t-shirt. “Just thought I would drop by,” he said. “Is it a bad time?”

  “Not at all. Come in. I got a bottle of Cristo Rey open, and I shouldn’t finish it by myself.”

  “That surely does sound good.”

  D’Alencon was pudgy, perma-stubbled, with curly salt-and-pepper hair, a few years older than me. It was downright weird to see him out of uniform, but I was glad of it. The last thing I needed was for the neighbors to see a police officer visiting my house.

  I led him into the living-room and flipped the lights on. “Sorry, nowhere to sit except the floor.”

  “You been painting in here?”

  “Yeah, fixing the place up. Just a second, I’ll get another cup.”

  I washed the one Lucy had drunk juice out of this morning. While I was doing that, I finetuned my reflection in the dark window over the sink, the way I sometimes did before meeting with customers. Shoulders down, relaxed: check. Friendly smile: check. It didn’t reach my eyes, but he wouldn’t be able to tell. He didn’t know me that well.

  I poured for him. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers. Lucy?”

  “She’s at summer camp. Dropped her off today.”

  “Nice. So she’s doing OK?”

  “Yup. She’s been through a traumatic experience, of course. But she’s bouncing back. How are your boys?” I remembered that he had three sons.

  “Good, good. You should bring Lucy out to my place one of these weekends, when she gets back from camp. We’ll fire up the grill in the back yard.”

  “Sounds great.” It would snow in Ponce de Leon before I took him up on that offer.

  “We got a jungle gym. The kids can play, and you can help me celebrate my promotion.”

  “You got promoted?” I almost choked on my drink. “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, they call it a promotion. I call it a cut in my overtime pay,” d’Alencon joked.

  “So what do I call you now?”

  “You can call me Bones, same as ever. At the department, it’s Detective Inspector. My boys are disappointed that I don’t wear the uniform anymore.”

  “And there I thought you were off-duty.”

  “Oh, I am off-duty. Relax, Tiger, officially I ain’t even here.”

  I wondered what that meant. “So how’s the trial of the century coming?” I figured I had better bring it up before he did.

  “Which one? Parsec or Ijiuto?”

  “Either. Both.”

  D’Alencon grinned. “Parsec’s in the bag. We flipped a couple of his subordinates. Remember that guy Silverback? He’s going on the stand.” He lowered his voice confidingly. “I shouldn’t be talking out of school, but the chief prosecutor is confident of getting the maximum sentence on the smuggling charges, so she won’t be introducing the connection with the Travellers, as the sentences would run concurrently, anyway. I expect you’ll be glad to hear that.”

  “That is a load off my mind. When’s the trial?”

  “Figure the end of September. Meanwhile, friend Parsec is enjoying the governor’s hospitality at Buonaville.”

  Buonaville Penitentiary was Ponce de Leon’s largest prison, notorious for inmate violence. “Not Fairview?” That’s where they usually stashed the white-collar criminals. It had a golf course.

  “Strangely enough, there wasn’t room.”

  I laughed, but I guessed the real reason was that Parsec had offended the chief prosecutor by pleading innocent while being a Shifter. Buonaville. Shit. I almost felt sorry for Parsec. On the other hand, if he got shanked in the shower, I’d have one less thing to worry about. “Well, thanks for keeping me in the loop, Bones.”

  Maybe he really had just come over for a friendly visit, to stay in touch, like he’d said he would.

  Yet the way we were sitting, side by side with our backs to the wall, made me think of the way we had sat side by side in the basement at police headquarters while I confessed all my crimes to him. I had cried.

  I wanted to move, to see his face better, but that would look weird. Instead I lit a cigarette and drew the cereal bowl I was using as an ashtray closer.

  D’Alencon did not comment on my smoking habit. For all he knew, I had never kicked it after Tech Duinn. He sat crosslegged with his hands loosely laced around his cup. I noticed he hadn’t drunk more than a couple sips. “On the other hand, as regards Ijiuto …”

  “Yeah,” I said, too quickly. “Has he talked?” Ijiuto had at least some of the answers I was looking for. I would give my left nut for five minutes alone with him. But he was in jail, awaiting trial on charges of purchasing bio-weapons.

  D’Alencon grimaced. “He’s lawyered up.”

  “How? He was broke!”

  “He ain’t broke anymore. Guess his relations in the Darkworlds got coin.”

  I shook my head, remembering Dolph’s question—where’s the money coming from? It really was a mystery. “Where would Darkworlders get GCs? From selling goat skins and wood carvings?”

  Humanity had colonized the Darkworlds, a star system 150 light years outside the Cluster, around the same time as San Damiano. This was in the first FTL era, when skip drives were much slower than they are now. The long expansion from Earth towards the Messier 4 Cluster had taken a thousand years, and left a trail of human tragedies along the way. Colonies could not count on getting outside help if shit went sideways. And inevitably, it did.

  About fifty years ago, after our high-speed, take-no-prisoners colonization of the Cluster, Fleet ships with modern skip drives re-contacted the Darkworlds. They found a few million humans living in log cabins, keeping goats, growing potatoes, and burning coal for power and heat. The Darkworlders didn’t have a single spaceship left. I assumed things had improved since then, but still it was hard to imagine what the Darkworlders could contribute to the interstellar economy.

  “There’s always mining,” d’Alencon said.

  “Over that kind of distance? It wouldn’t be profitable to
ship even gold or platinum-group metals.”

  “Data mining?”

  “Possible, I guess.”

  “Currency mining.”

  “Yeah, but that assumes a high-tech manufacturing base, or else the wherewithal to buy thousands, make that millions, of servers, and all the rest of the kit. And a FTL drone, and its support infrastructure. Bet you they haven’t even got an EkBank node out there.”

  “No,” d’Alencon admitted, “they haven’t.”

  “Ijiuto told me he paid the Travellers in kind,” I pondered. “I still can’t work out what he could’ve been referring to.”

  “People,” d’Alencon suggested. “Also known as parts on the hoof. There’s still a trade in natural organs; they’re higher quality than the vat-grown kind.”

  “That’s fucking revolting.” My smile faded as I contemplated the notion of Sophia being involved in such a vile trade. No, I still wasn’t over being shocked by her depravity.

  For a few minutes we had been talking like colleagues. But now d’Alencon reverted to his police officer’s manner.

  “Anyway, leaving aside how he came by the cash, he’s retained the best lawyers on the planet for his defense, and he ain’t saying shit. At this point it’s questionable whether we can even bring him to trial.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I was. The prosecutor’s office is focused on Parsec, and there just isn’t the same hunger to convict a Darkworlder of, what? Buying some toy fairies?”

  Now I understood why d’Alencon was here. “You came to tell me he’s gonna walk.”

  “That’s what it’s looking like.”

  “Oh, I don’t … That’s bullshit.”

  D’Alencon sighed. “Unfortunately, there’s political aspects to it. The Gessyrias are not signatories to all of our accords. They aren’t in the London Charter.” This was the lynchpin of our interstellar law, Earth’s last major contribution to human unity. “So they’re making noises about extradition, diplomatic immunity, this and that.”

  “What a goddamn travesty.”

  “Look on the bright side: we nailed Parsec, anyway.” D’Alencon set down his cup on the floor and stood up. “I gotta roll, Tiger. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.”