CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I awoke in stages, the first being the vague awareness that I was conscious, the second being that the side of my head was pressed against a hard surface, the third being that that same part of my head hurt.
The fourth stage was gaining enough awareness to wonder what the hell had just happened.
Carefully, I opened my eyes. I was still in the same private taverno room I’d started in, with the same round table and the same smell of beer.
And with the same companions.
It was like a scene from some community service video warning against the hazards of excessive alcohol and drugs. Trent, Beeks, and Jingo were passed out in their chairs, their heads resting sideways on the table just as mine had been. My first fear was that they were dead, but then I spotted the slow torso rhythms that showed they were still breathing. I gazed at them for a minute, and only then did it occur to me to look at my watch.
I’d been asleep for nearly twenty minutes.
I looked at Trent again, taking a few deep breaths to clear the cobwebs out of my lungs and hopefully my brain. Clearly, just as I’d drugged them, they’d also drugged me.
The only thing that had saved me was that my knockout pills lasted longer than theirs.
I frowned, rubbing the side of my head as I looked at the three sleeping beauties. Okay, so I’d been drugged. Beeks had done the deed, but I couldn’t imagine he would do such a thing on his own initiative.
So why would Trent want to drug me?
Because he didn’t want to split the bounty on Nikki? Ridiculous. He was the one who’d called me in on this. Furthermore, if he knew even vaguely where Nikki was he would surely have realized I was going the wrong direction. All he needed to do was let me stride off into the sunset, and he’d have been rid of me.
Maybe it would make sense after the rest of my drug-induced stupor went away. Somehow, I doubted it.
But whether it did or not, I didn’t have the time right now to pick at it. Nikki was in trouble, and I’d just lost half an hour out of whatever window there was to get her out of it.
Speaking of windows . . .
Carefully, trying to expose myself as little as I could, I sidled over to the window and took a long look outside. If Trent had watchers waiting down there for the signal to come haul my carcass away, I didn’t see them.
But whether they were there or not, it was time to go. Checking to make sure my plasmic was still in its concealed holster—it was, and the power pack was still in place—I headed out the door and down the stairs. The main taverno room had a few more patrons than had been there earlier, and I had a couple of tense moments as I crossed to the exit. But no one did anything more than give me wary looks, and a moment later I was back on the street.
My earlier plan had been to check out the barbeque street cart before approaching Picker’s pawnshop. But with that lost half hour, and a lot of customers now lined up at the cart, I decided it would have to be the direct approach instead. I headed south again, trying to watch everywhere at once, and finally came in sight of my destination.
I’d looked for watchers outside Trent’s taverno and hadn’t seen any. The reason for that now seemed obvious: Every single one of them had apparently taken up posts here on Picker’s street.
I studied their stakeout pattern as I walked casually down the street toward the pawnshop, and quickly realized that my first assumption had been wrong. These weren’t more of Trent’s men and women, who would have set up an interlocking web around their target. These were simply a collection of bounty hunters, each working independently, which meant each was in conflict with the others as they jockeyed for the best spots or sat off in the rear in hopes of snatching Nikki from whoever got to her first.
There were a lot of problems with a setup like that. But the biggest and most useful, at least to me, was that there was no effort at mutual support. If I looked hard enough, I should be able to find someone who was completely out of view of all the others.
I was halfway down the first block when I spotted him.
He was a big man, with blond hair and beard and what looked to be a permanent scowl, the latter likely being the reason for his current solitude. He’d planted himself beneath an alley-side window of the building next door to Picker’s, clearly expecting Nikki to find a way across and then sneak down the side of that building while everyone else was focused on the pawnshop.
Not a bad strategy, actually. I’d also noticed the pipe bridge that linked the two rooftops as I came down the street, a pathway that could theoretically be used to travel between them. It would be tricky to keep any of the hunters below from spotting such a move, but I had no doubt Nikki could pull it off.
I continued down the street, noting the overall sense of tension increasing with every step I took toward the pawnshop door. I reached it and passed without pause or even a glance, feeling the tension take a corresponding dive. Despite the larger, block-wide cordon, it was clear that some of them, at least, had narrowed it down to the pawnshop.
Which was fine with me. The more the hunters concentrated on the pawnshop, the less they’d be looking in all the other directions.
I made my way to the end of the street and turned the corner. More hunters loitered on this side of the block, probably focused on the building that backed up behind the pawnshop. I continued past without looking at them, and again turned at the next street. There were a couple of hunters here, but since this side featured an entirely different group of buildings, there wasn’t a lot of point in guarding it, though there might be a way for Nikki to get through to the building that backed up to Picker’s. Still, I suspected these particular hunters would probably have preferred to take up station in the alley if Scowly hadn’t planted himself there first.
With luck, that spot might yet become available.
I continued to the alley and turned into it, walking straight into what was probably Scowly’s best glare. “Butt out,” he growled as soon as I was close enough for him to deliver a warning without raising his voice enough to attract attention. “Butt out, or be sorry.”
“You think I want to be here?” I growled back, starting to pull out my info pad. “I was told to give you the latest from the boss.”
“What boss?” he retorted. “I work alone.” He lifted the edge of his jacket to show his holstered Libra Gold 4mm. “And take your hand off that thing.”
“It’s just an info pad,” I said, coming to an awkward halt and letting my pad slide back into its pouch. “You’re not—? Sorry, I thought you were with us. My mistake.”
I turned and started to retrace my steps back toward the alley mouth, stroking my left thumbnail to activate the mirror there and holding it where I could see behind me. Scowly might be proudly independent, but no hunter with any brains let fresh intel just walk away from him.
He didn’t. He came up behind me with a speed and silence that were particularly impressive given his size. “What’s your hurry?” he muttered practically in my ear as his hand closed around my arm. “I’ll just take that—”
His threat broke off into an agonized squeak as I jabbed my elbow into his solar plexus. The impact loosened his grip on my arm; spinning on my heel, I turned to face him and slammed my fist into his throat. He staggered a couple of steps backward . . .
And to my surprise and dismay, he shook his head as if clearing it, rubbed briefly where my elbow and fist had tried to dent him, and started forward again.
My first and probably smartest instinct was to turn and run. He couldn’t shoot me without the risk of the noise alerting his quarry and the other hunters, and if he chased me too far he would lose this prime spot.
But then I thought about Selene, and what she would say if I left Nikki twisting slowly in the wind.
Which was a puzzle all in itself. Selene didn’t like Nikki—that much was painfully obvious. At the same time, it was equally clear that she didn’t like the thought of abandoning even an assassin to the dregs of the hunter community.
Again, a conversation for another day. In the meantime, Scowly was striding purposefully toward me, and unless I did something fast there might not be any other days for all these conversations that kept stacking up. “Hold it,” I snapped, snatching out my plasmic and holding it uncertainly in front of me.
Despite his obvious pain, Scowly managed a smile. Like all experienced hunters, he was good at reading people, and he could tell that I wasn’t prepared to shoot him down in cold blood. I started to back away; he compensated by picking up speed. He stretched out his hand as he reached me, intent on grabbing the plasmic. I countered by smoothly drawing it back and to my right, wondering if he would recognize that I was deliberately drawing him out of position.
He didn’t, or if he did it didn’t penetrate his angry resolve fast enough. His grasping fingers were nearly to the weapon—
And as they closed over the muzzle I let go, spun to my left on my right heel, and stuck my left leg out behind me directly in his path.
If he’d been going slower he might have been able to dodge the leg sweep. But with his speed and his single-minded fixation on disarming me before I fired he didn’t have a chance. His shin hit the back of my leg, and he had just enough time to let out a strangled gasp before he fell face-first onto the pavement. He put out both hands, trying to stop his fall, and mostly succeeded, even managing to keep hold of his stolen plasmic. He twisted around onto his back as I regained my own balance and threw myself at him, wasting his last precious second trying to get the plasmic turned around in his big hands and aimed at me.
I was sailing through the air toward him in full belly-flop formation when he finally got the weapon in position and squeezed the trigger. He had just enough time to register that nothing had happened when I slammed down on top of him.
My elbow in his stomach hadn’t knocked the wind out of him the way I’d hoped. My full body weight landing squarely on top of his torso did. He puffed out an agonized explosion of air, and into his wide-open mouth I popped one of my knockout pills.
He was still struggling to recover from my body slam when the drug sent his eyes rolling upward, loosened his muscles, and sent him to dreamland.
Breathing hard, I climbed off him, untangled my plasmic from his limp fingers, and retrieved the power pack I’d ejected from the weapon just as he was grabbing it. A quick check of both ends of the alley to make sure I hadn’t attracted unwelcome attention, and I tucked the weapon back out of sight.
My phone vibed in my pocket. Sifting through Scowly’s pockets with one hand, I fished out my phone with the other and keyed it on. “That you?” I asked.
“Yes,” Nikki’s voice came back. “What the hell are you doing out there?”
“Clearing away some of the riffraff,” I told her, frowning. There shouldn’t be any way she could see me from Picker’s building. Had she gotten free and somehow made her way across to the building beside me?
“And making enough noise doing it to wake up every badgeman in Rosselgang City,” she retorted. “You’ve got a plasmic—next time just shoot him. It’ll be a lot quieter.”
“You’re welcome,” I growled. There was a folded paper in Scowly’s inner pocket, and I pulled it out. “What are you doing wandering around? I thought you were a prisoner.”
“Who told you that?”
“So the deeply coded phone message was just you having some fun?” I asked sarcastically as I unfolded the paper. “I assumed it meant you were in trouble and couldn’t talk freely. My mistake.”
“Oh, I’m in trouble, all right,” she said. “But it’s not as simple as that. Are you finished there?”
“Unless you want to complain about my rescue technique some more.”
“Maybe later,” she said. “Head back out the alley, turn right at the end, and take the first door. Beloi Apartments. I’ll meet you inside.”
I frowned. From Picker’s shop, to the building overlooking the alley, to the apartment building on the next street over. Was the whole block honeycombed with secret tunnels? “Fine. I’ll be right there.”
“And make it snappy,” she added. “Sooner or later, they’re going to storm this place, and I’d just as soon not be here when that happens.”
“Right,” I said, grimacing as I unfolded the paper and saw what was on it. “I think I can second that.”
* * *
The apartment building was unlocked. Resisting the urge to draw my plasmic before entering, I pulled open the door and went inside.
The entryway lights, which had probably never been any great shakes to begin with, were dim or out completely. It made for plenty of shadows, and I spotted Nikki lurking in one of them. She waited until I’d closed the door behind me, then moved in and locked it. “This way,” she muttered, and led the way down a short corridor to a janitor’s closet. Unlocking it, she went inside and rolled up the spill mat on the floor to reveal a trapdoor with a short flight of steps leading downward. We headed down into a basement area, a big one, with walls that were beyond the reach of our small flashlights.
“So this is how you got out of Picker’s place?” I asked quietly as we headed across the floor. “Nice. Covers the whole block, I assume?”
“Yes,” she said. “Been sealed since the original owners sold off the buildings about eighty years ago. Franck and his former partners started buying up the buildings twenty years ago and opening them up to the basement again.”
“Handy.”
“Secrets usually are.”
We reached another stairway, she got the trapdoor above us open, and we headed up. Three minutes later, we were in a spacious workroom above Picker’s pawnshop.
An older and rather corpulent man was waiting for us, an artistically designed but nonetheless very nasty-looking plasmic rifle pointed at me as I followed Nikki through the hidden doorway. “Mr. Picker, I presume,” I said, inclining my head and holding out my hands to show they were empty. “Given the lack of reaction from my associate here I assume you’re not the current threat?”
Picker grunted, his eyes flicking to Nikki. “He always this wordy?” he rumbled.
“He tends that way,” Nikki agreed. “But right now, he’s my best path out of here.”
“If you say so,” he said, lowering his plasmic a little but keeping it ready.
“I say so,” Nikki said. “Nice of you to join us, Roarke.”
“The pleasure’s all yours,” I said. “So I gather Mr. Picker is more of an ally than a jailer?”
“Who said anything about him being a jailer?”
“That’s usually what’s implied when someone wraps their call for help inside a lot of obscure language and vague clues,” I growled. “You could have saved us a lot of time and effort if you’d just said everything in plain language.”
“I couldn’t,” Nikki said. “Someone might have been listening in.”
“Like Selene?”
“Like someone you might have been having a drink with,” she said. “A hunter, or worse.”
“What would be worse?”
“Never mind,” she said. “That being said, it took you long enough to figure out the clues. You usually need luminous trail markers when you’re on a hunt?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “If you subtract the half hour I spent sleeping off a Mickey Finn, I think I did pretty well.”
I had the modest satisfaction of seeing her actually look surprised. “You were drugged? How? Where?”
“We can talk about that later,” I said. “Right now, let’s focus on the task at hand. Tell me about the immediate threat, and why exactly you dragged me here.” I gestured to Picker and his rifle. “It’s not like you needed the extra firepower.”
“Of course I need it,” Nikki said. “You expect Franck to open fire on his neighbors?”
“Ah,” I said, nodding as it started to come clear. “Let me guess. My part was to charge to the rescue, all square-jawed and steely-eyed, so as to draw all that brooding attention out there. Then, while they were all focused on killing me, you’d slip out the back door?”
“Mostly,” she said without any embarrassment I could detect. “Except that I assumed you were good enough to just lead them away and not die in the process.”
“I’m flattered you think so highly of me,” I growled. “But I can’t help noticing that you were prepared in case I wasn’t as good as you thought.”
Her lips compressed briefly. “I had to consider all the possibilities. You understand.”
“I suppose,” I said. “I’ll just point out that I can do an exceptionally fine diversion when I know that’s what I’m being asked to do. Trying to play me doesn’t gain you anything, and even costs you a little.”
She inclined her head. “Point taken. I’ll remember that in the future.”
“Yes. About that future.” Keeping my movements slow and nonthreatening, I pulled out the paper I’d taken from Scowly. “The hunters out there have a pretty good sketch of your face.” I flipped it open and held it up in front of her. “They also have your name . . . Nicole.”
For a moment the room was silent. I kept my eyes on Nikki, but also kept Picker at the edge of my vision. So far he seemed to be following Nikki’s lead, but depending on how dark he thought she wanted to keep her secret it was possible he would take action on his own.
Apparently, Nikki thought so, too. Taking a deep breath, she made a calming twitch of her fingertips toward her friend. “Like I told you, it’s Nikki,” she corrected, her voice studiously neutral. “My parents are the only ones who ever called me Nicole. You really think this is a good sketch?”
“I think it captures you pretty well.”
She shook her head and handed it back. “Not even close.”
“Next time I’ll call in an art appraiser.” I said, clamping down on a sudden flash of anger. Her complete nonchalance at the deception she’d pulled was unbelievable. “You know, it would have been awfully handy to know from the beginning who exactly we were dealing with. But again, that’s for later. Right now we need to figure out how to get us clear of the mousetrap out there. Any thoughts?”
“You already know we can get to any building on this block,” she said. “That includes the café on the corner, the Beloi Apartments, a dress shop, a hardware store, and Franck’s pawnshop downstairs.”
“What was your plan assuming I was able to draw them off?”
“Get a wig and new clothing from the dress shop and slip out.” She nodded toward the paper I was still holding. “That sketch may not be good, but it’s unfortunately good enough.”
“Agreed,” I said, a slightly crazy plan starting to form in the back of my brain. If she couldn’t walk out of here . . . “Any idea how many hunters we’re facing? I counted nine on my way in, but those were the obvious ones.”
“I’d say at least fifteen,” she said. “Some more competent than others, of course.”
“As is the way of things,” I said. At least with Trent and his buddies snoozing away the afternoon we were three down from where that number might have been. “Can we get to the roof?”
“I don’t know,” Nikki said. “Franck?”
“There’s an access hatch on the top of the Beloi,” Picker said, frowning at me. “But it’s four stories straight down, and the street’s too wide for you to jump it.”
“Not planning to jump,” I assured him. “Okay. Let’s take a look at that dress shop and see what we’ve got to work with.”
“You have an idea,” Nikki said, looking closely at me.
“I do.” I gave her a tight smile. “As the fashion industry is fond of saying, we’re going to create a new you.”
* * *
The dress shop was across the alley from the apartment building Nikki had brought me in through. She led me back down to the common basement, up another hidden stairway into the shop’s back room, and up the regular staff stairs to the second-floor stockroom. There, we found the treasure trove she’d mentioned: clothing, wigs, makeup kits—everything for the discerning woman navigating the criminal paradise that was the Badlands.
More important, at least to me, were a couple of damaged mannikins awaiting refurbishing. We collected what we needed, cleared off a sewing desk, and got to work.
“This doesn’t have a chance in hell of working,” Nikki warned as she struggled to untangle a bleached blond wig I’d found in a corner behind some bolts of cloth. “You know that, don’t you?”
“As I already told you, I’m open to suggestions,” I reminded her. “But I think you’re selling the power of suggestion short. As my father used to say, Assumptions are like body odor. Most people don’t know when they’re making them.”
“Your father had a bizarre sense of humor.”
“I prefer to think of it as delightfully unique.”
“It’s still bizarre.”
“Probably,” I said. “Tell me about the man who hired you to kill Horace Markelly.”
“I can’t talk about my clients.”
“He isn’t a client,” I reminded her. “You turned him down, remember?”
She pursed her lips, forehead wrinkled in thought. “There are still limits. What do you want to know?”
“Mostly why the hell he’s so hot on taking you out,” I said. “The attack in Mikilias was bad enough, with four hunters competing for the dubious honor of trading shots with you. But whipping the Badlands into a frenzy is a whole new level of crazy. You said you talked to him from the Lucias Four research station?”
“Yes,” Nikki said, still looking thoughtful. “He swore he hadn’t put out a notice on me. That whatever happened in Mikilias wasn’t him.”
“You believe him?”
She shrugged. “I did at the time,” she said. “Not as sure now. I did tell him that if it was him, and if he ever tried something like that again, I’d burn him to the ground.” She gave me a bitter edged smile. “I’m pretty sure he believed me.”
“That seems reasonable,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten. “So if it wasn’t him, who else could it be? Who have you seriously annoyed lately?”
She looked down at the wig in her hands. “This is way past annoyance, Roarke. Whoever it is has my face. Nobody out there is supposed to have my face.”
“You meet all your prospective clients wearing the veil you had on when you came aboard the Ruth?”
“Always,” she said. “Sometimes I arrange the meet at a masque where everyone’s already disguised.”
“Handy,” I said, frowning at her. Considering her occupation, I wasn’t at all surprised that she was fixated on keeping her anonymity.
Yet she’d had no problem letting Selene and me see her face aboard the Ruth.
But then, we hadn’t known who she really was. Did that make a difference? “New question,” I said. “Why—?”
“Can we save the questions for later?” she interrupted. “We have work to do here.”
“Which will go just as quickly with conversation as it will with silence.”
She snorted. “Let me guess. Your father used to say something about that, too?”
“I remember a line about idle hands, but it doesn’t really apply here,” I said. “My question was, what was that whole Piper charade about?”
“What Piper charade?”
I eyed her. She was still working on the wig, a perfect blend of interest and puzzlement on her face. “The Piper charade,” I repeated. “Wherein you have Floyd bring a woman wearing your travel gear and veil to the Ruth and tell us she’s our passenger, and then go off, switch clothes with her, and come aboard pretending to be her.”
“I have no idea where you got such a ridiculous—”
“I don’t know if she voluntarily changed clothes with you or you killed her and stole them,” I cut her off. “Don’t really care, either. I just want to know why.”
Nikki gave me a long, measuring look. Then, she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Best guess is that Cherno decided to trade up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he decided at the last minute to hire me instead of Piper.”
I frowned. I’d assumed Piper was just a stand-in that Nikki had hired for the occasion. “You’re saying Piper’s another assassin?”
“Of course,” Nikki said. “Cherno wouldn’t have hired her if he didn’t know she could handle it. She specializes in the surreptitious, subtle jobs. She’s good enough, I suppose, but she’s not me.”
“Because she sometimes misses?”
Nikki eyed me coolly. “Yes.”
For a moment I was tempted to push back at that claim. But it seemed pointless, and anyway she was about to get a chance to prove it. “So Cherno just fired her?”
“More or less,” Nikki said. Her voice had changed subtly, but I couldn’t tell what that meant. “She got paid—she told me that. He told us to have her meet you instead of me and then I would switch out with her. He didn’t explain, and I didn’t ask.”
“Seems overly complicated,” I said. “Especially with the veil making you pretty anonymous to begin with.”
She shrugged. “For half a million commarks I’m willing to make reasonable accommodations. When is Selene due back?”
I checked my watch. “Any time now,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Let me try to call her.”
She answered on the fourth vibe, with the news that she had indeed returned safely and the Ruth was back on our assigned pad. I gave her a quick update of the situation, omitting the Trent part for a later time, and told her about the plan.
She wasn’t any more enthusiastic about it than Nikki had been. But unlike Nikki, she at least accepted the basic psychology involved. I gave her our location, we set a time, and I keyed off.
“And that’s that,” I said, putting the phone away. “Let’s get this wrapped up.”
“And give them a show?” Nikki asked.
“Trust me,” I said. “They’ll be talking about this one for years to come.”