He broke the connection. Sat staring at the phone for a while.
So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?
It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.
They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.
The phone sat in his hand.
Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a raise when you get back.
The phone.
Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favors, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.
Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.
Oh, how very alpha-male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.
He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realized suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.
Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.
There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.
You don’t know that.
He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.
You don’t know he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy-eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it.
He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.
Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.
He grimaced. Dialed from memory.
Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late-afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open-access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled-out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holosigns that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.
It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of Bulgakov’s Cat. The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.
“Yeah, Ertekin.”
“Alcatraz Control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?”
“Patched?” She frowned. “Patched from where?”
“New York, apparently. A Detective Williamson?”
She grappled with memory—saw again the tall, hard-boned black man amid uniforms and incident barriers and the shrink-wrapped corpses outside her home. Marsalis, seated on the front steps, gazing at it all like a tourist, as if the dead men were nothing to do with him at all. Crisp October air, and the never-stilled sounds of the city getting on with life. New York seemed suddenly as far away as Mars, and the gun battle some part of her distant past.
“Yeah, I’ll take it.”
Williamson came through, wavery with the patch. “Ms. Ertekin?”
“Speaking.” A little breathless from her pace through a bookstore with mercifully few browsing customers.
“Is this a bad time?”
“No worse than any other. What can I do for you, Detective?”
“It’s more what I can do for you, Ms. Ertekin. We have some information you might like.” He hesitated for a moment. “I ran into Larry Kasabian. He speaks very highly of you.”
She blinked back to the mist-deadened sounds of the IA digging robot, the field at dawn, and the sudden waft of the bodies. Kasabian at her side, blunt and silent, an occasional flickered glance under knotted brows. Once, he nodded grimly at her, some barely perceptible amalgam of solidarity and weariness, but he never spoke. It was the habit of weeks now—they were all watching their words. IA were all over the place, authorized to listen electronically who knew where.
“That’s very kind of Larry.” She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amid menswear, hopped half to a halt, and dodged around them. “And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?”
“What I’ve got, Ms. Ertekin, is your third shooter for Alvaro Ortiz.”
She nearly stopped again, in clear space. “Is he alive?”
“Very much so. There’s a hole in his shoulder, but otherwise he’ll be just fine. Got into a fight in a bar over in Brooklyn, pulled a piece, and it turns out the place is full of off-duty cops.” Williamson chuckled. “You believe that luck?”
“Not a local boy then?”
“No, he’s from the Republic, someplace out west. Dirk Shindel. Right of residence in the Union, he’s got a grandparent up in Maine somewhere, but no official citizenship. We can’t put him at the scene with genetic trace, but he’s copped to it anyway.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“We’re sweating him pretty hard,” Williamson said casually. “Got one of the Homicide psych teams on it. Thing is, our boy Dirk was all fucked up on hormone jolts and street syn when the Brooklyn thing went down. You know what a cocktail like that’ll do. He’s babbling like a snake handler.”
Along her nerves, Sevgi felt the subtle thrum of her own decidedly nonstreet syn dosage. She summoned a dutiful chuckle. “Yeah, seen that before. So what’s he said about Ortiz?”
“Said a whole lot of stuff, I can file it over to you if you want. Boils down to he was hired out of Houston by some front guy he’s never met, friend of the other two in the crew. Quite a lot of money, which I guess for a hit on a guy like Ortiz you’d expect, but it doesn’t explain why the low-grade hires. Shindel says he’s whacked guys before, in the Republic, but the psych team think he’s lying. At best, they reckon he was maybe a driver or a backup man.”
“What about the others?”
“Yeah, Leroy Atkins. That’s the guy your, uh, enhanced friend put down with the machine pistol. Turns out he’s got some record in the Republic, but strictly spray-and-run stuff. Cop I talked to in the Houston PD said he thought Atkins might have upped his game in the last couple of years, gone out of state for the work. Nothing they can touch him for, it’s just street rumor and implied Yaroshanko links from some West Coast n-djinn Houston rent time on. Same with the other guy, uh, Fabiano, Angel Fabiano. Houston resident, some gang affiliations down there. Been doing time since he was a kid, but they never got him for worse than possession of abortifacients with intent to sell, and some aggravated assault. But Houston reckon he might have upgraded as well. He’s a known associate of Atkins.”
“Okay.” Disloyalty for Norton snaked in her, deep enough to force a grimace onto her face. She asked anyway. “Did Shindel have anything to say about Marsalis?”
“Marsalis? The thirteen guy?” Pause while Williamson presumably scrolled through the report. “No. Nothing here outside of we would have brought the whole thing off, too, that fucking nigger twist hadn’t been there. No offense.”
“No offense?”
“Yeah.” Williamson’s tone shifted into sour amusement. “One of the psych team’s the same color as me. This is one sensitive Jesuslander we’re dealing with here.”
Sevgi grunted. “Probably the syn talking. He tell you how they ended up outside my front door?”
“Yeah, he was pissed about that, too. Told us they’d been watching Ortiz for weeks, mapping his moves. Seems he always went by this coffeehouse he liked on West Ninety-seventh, they were going to track him across there on the skates and light him up outside. The skates, that’s an old Houston sicario standby, apparently. Good for city-center hits where you’ve got high-volume, slow-moving traffic. Anyway, the way Shindel paints it, Ortiz breaks his routine and heads uptown suddenly, they go after him but it nearly kills them to keep up. By the time they get to Hundred eighteenth, they’re panting like dogs, they just want to get this thing finished.”