“Guilt? Give me a fucking break. Now you’re talking just like them. Variant thirteen doesn’t do guilt, that’s a cudlip thing.”
“Yes, all the ones you’ve hunted down, murdered, or taken back to a living death in the tracts.” But Onbekend was calmer now, voice dropping back to even. “It stands to reason you couldn’t live with it forever.”
“Try me.”
A bleak smile. “Happily, I don’t have to. And as for the suicide, you’ve made it easy for me.”
“Really?” Carl looked elaborately around him. “This doesn’t look much like a suicide scene to me.”
But under the drawl, he already saw the angle and something very like panic started to ice through him. He’d played all his cards, and Onbekend just hadn’t loosened enough. The other thirteen was watching him minutely again, back to the cold control he’d walked in with. Awareness of the place they were in congealed around him—ancient grimy fittings, the long arm of the bartop, scars and spill stains gleaming in the low light and the piled-up glassware and bottles behind. The worn pool tables in their puddles of light from the overheads. Dougie Kwang faceup on the floor, head rolled to one side, eyes staring open across the room at him. Waiting for company, for someone to join him down there in the dust and sticky stains.
“Suicide would be hard to fake here,” Onbekend agreed. “Would have been harder to fake wherever we did it. But you’ve been kind enough to let your drives get the better of you and so here we are, a mindless bar brawl in a low-grade neighborhood with low-grade criminals to match, and it seems Carl Marsalis just miscalled the odds. Pretty fucking stupid way to die, but hey.” A shrug. Onbekend’s voice tinged suddenly with contempt. “They’ll believe it of you. You’ve given them no reason not to.”
The oblique accusation stung. In the back of his head, Sutherland concurred. If we are ruled by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth.
Ertekin might not buy it.
Yeah, but she might. You don’t always get a clean wrap, Marsalis. Remember that? Life is messy, and so is crime.
Kwang seemed to wink at him from the floor.
Could be this’ll be just messy enough for her, soak.
As if he didn’t have enough with his own thoughts beating him up, Onbekend was still going strong.
“They’ll believe you were too stupid to beat your own programming,” he said matter-of-factly, as if he’d been there for Sutherland’s musings, too. “Because you are. They’ll believe you went looking for trouble, because you did exactly that, and they’ll believe you found a little too much of it down here to handle alone. So they’ll do a little light investigating, they’ll talk to some people, and in the end they’ll decide you got shot at close range with a nondescript gun that’ll never be found, in the hand of some nameless street thug who’ll also never be found, and they’ll walk away, Marsalis, they’ll walk away because it’ll fit right in with this idiocy you’ve spontaneously generated for us. I couldn’t have arranged it better myself.”
Carl gestured. “That’s hardly a nondescript gun.”
“This?” Onbekend lifted the revolver again, weighed it in his hand. “This is—”
Now.
It wasn’t much—the fractionally lowered reflexive response in the other man, neurochemical sparks lulled and damped down by Carl’s previous open-handed gestures and the descending calm after all the shouting. Then the fractional shift of the revolver’s muzzle, the few degrees off and the brief lack of tension on the trigger. Then Onbekend’s standard-issue thirteen sense of superiority, the curious need he seemed to have to lecture. It wasn’t much.
Not much at all.
Carl exploded out of the chair, hands to the table edge, flipping it up and over. Onbekend got one shot off, wide, and then he was staggering back, trying to get out of the chair and on his feet. The shadow by the door yelled and moved. Carl was across the empty space where the table had been, into Onbekend, palm heel and hooking elbow, turning, try for the gun, lock in close, too close to shoot at. He had the other thirteen’s arm in both hands now, twisted the revolver up and around, looking for the man by the door. Tried for the trigger. Onbekend got his finger out, blocked the attempt, but it didn’t matter. The other man yelled again, dodged away from the slug he thought was coming. The door flew inward on its hinges, the other half of Onbekend’s human backup burst into the room. Carl yanked at the revolver, couldn’t get it free. The new arrival didn’t make the same mistake as his companion. He stepped in, grinning.
“Just hold him there, Onbee.”
Desperate, Carl hacked sideways with one foot, tried to get the fight on the ground and jar the revolver out of Onbekend’s stubborn grip. The other thirteen locked ankles with him, stood firm, and Carl tumbled instead, pulled off balance by his own weight and a tanindo move that hadn’t worked. Onbekend timed it just right, stepped wide and shrugged him off like a heavy backpack. He went down, clutching for the revolver, didn’t get it. Onbekend kicked him in the groin. He convulsed around the blow, tried frantically to roll, to get up—
Onbekend leveled the revolver.
The world seemed to stop, to lean in and watch.
In the small unreal stillness, he knew the impact before it came, and the knowledge was terrifying because it felt like freedom. He felt himself open to it, like spreading wings, like snarling. His eyes locked with Onbekend’s. He grinned and spat out a final defiance.
“You sad, deluded little fuck.”
And then the gunblasts, the final violence through the quiet, again—again—again, like the repeated slamming of a door in a storm.
CHAPTER 42
The Beretta Marstech had a burst function that allowed three shots for every trigger pull. Sevgi Ertekin came through the door with it enabled, gun raised and cupped in both hands, and she squeezed the trigger twice for each figure in her sights. No time for niceties: she’d seen through the window what was about to go down. The expansion slugs made a flat, undramatic crackling sound as they launched, but they tore down her targets like cardboard.
Bodies jerked and hurled aside. Two down.
The third one was turning, tiger-swift, the first burst missed him altogether. A big, heavy silver revolver tracking around in his hand. She squeezed again and he flipped over backward like a circus trick.
Marsalis flopped about on the ground, struggled to sit up. She couldn’t see if he was hit. She advanced into the room, gun swinging to cover angles in approved fashion. Peering down at the men she’d just hit, no, wait—
—she took in staring eyes and crumpled, awkward postures, one of them slumped almost comically in the arms of a chair, legs slid out from under him, one on the floor in a sprawl of limbs like some tantrum-prone child’s doll—
—the men she’d just killed. The Marstech gun and its load, unequivocal in its sentencing as a Jesusland judge.
The third one hit her from the side. Flash glimpse of a bloodied face, distorted with rage. She hit the floor, arms splayed back to break the fall, lost the fucking Beretta with the impact. For a moment the third man lurched above her, growling through lips skinned back off his teeth, empty hands crooked like talons. The look in the eyes was savage, stripped of anything human. She felt the terror thrust up like wings in her stomach and chest.
He saw the fallen gun. Stepped past her to get it.
“Onbekend!”
Her attacker twisted around, bent halfway over to the Beretta, saw the same as her—Carl Marsalis, propped up off the floor with the big revolver in his hand.
Onbekend wheeled around and the shot went wide. Deep bellow of the heavy caliber across the room. Marsalis snarled something, swung and fired again. The door slammed shut on the other man.
Sevgi grabbed up her gun.
“You okay?”