"All right," Alicia agreed. "Is he available?"
"I'll go speak to him," Casey said. "If you'll wait here, please."
"Of course," the girl replied. She waited for Casey to go through the security door and then spun on her heel and stalked over to the entrance, staring out at the morning sunlight. Her posture was stiff with anger. She leaned her forearm on the glass door and pressed her forehead to it.
The tall young man, Li Xian, had remained silent the whole while. He followed her over to the door and spoke in a quiet voice I could scarcely hear. I narrowed my eyes and Listened.
"… back at any moment," Xian murmured. "We should sit down."
"Don't tell me what to do," Alicia shot back in a heated whisper. "I'm weary, not idiotic."
"You should get some rest before you do anything more," Xian said. "I don't see why you're playing games. You should have let me follow the guard back."
"Stop thinking with your stomach," the girl growled. "It's bad enough that you lost control without adding a further lack of discipline to the situation."
"We are not here because I stopped to eat," Xian replied, anger of his own in his whisper. "If you hadn't indulged yourself we wouldn't face this problem."
The girl spun from the glass, facing Xian squarely, her face contorted with pride and anger. "Your attitude, Li, is making you part of the problem. Not part of the solution."
The long- haired man went white and cringed back from the girl. His face rippled, a sort of slithery motion just beneath the surface of his skin that stretched his features grotesquely, causing a slight sinking of the eyes, a slight elongation of the jaw. He let out a gasp, and when his mouth opened I could see the teeth of a carnivore.
It happened for only a second, but I averted my eyes before he might have noticed me watching him. If he had seen me, I would have been in immediate danger. I'd seen a flash of Li Xian's true face-he was a ghoul. Ghouls are preternatural predators who derive their primary sustenance from devouring human flesh. Fresh, cold, rotting, they don't care as long as it gets into their bellies.
My stomach turned. Butters said that someone had removed Bartlesby's quadriceps, the long, strong muscles on the front of the thigh. It had been Xian. He'd carved himself steaks from the old man's corpse. If he suspected that I knew what he was, he might decide to protect himself with extreme prejudice, and that would be bad. Ghouls are quick, strong, and harder to kill than a juicy rumor about the president. I'd fought ghouls before, and it wasn't something I wanted to repeat if I could avoid it. Especially given that I'd left my staff in Butters's office.
Xian recovered his normal appearance and lowered his eyes. He bowed his head to Alicia.
"Do I make myself clear?" the girl whispered.
"Yes, my lord," Xian replied.
Lord? I thought. My mind raced over the possibilities.
Alicia exhaled and pressed her thumb against the spot between her eyebrows. "Don't talk, Xian. Just don't talk. We'll all be happier. And safer." She breezed past him, back to the little waiting area, and sat down. She picked up a copy of Newsweek sitting out on an end table and began to flick through it, while Xian remained standing near the door. I pretended to be drowsing.
Casey returned a couple of minutes later and said, "Ms. Nelson, it's going to be a while before Dr. Brioche can see you."
"How long?" she asked, smiling.
"An hour or so at least," Casey said. "He says that if you'd like to make an appointment for this afternoon that he will be glad to-"
"No," she interrupted him, shaking her head firmly. "Some of his business is time-critical, and I need to recover his effects at the earliest possible opportunity. Please tell him that I will wait."
Casey lifted his eyebrows and then shrugged. "Yes, ma'am."
I blinked my eyes a few times and then sat up straight, stretching. "Oh, hey, Casey," I mumbled, standing. I feigned a limp and went to the desk. "I left my cane in Butters's office. Would it be okay to go back and grab it?"
Casey nodded. "One second." He picked up the phone, and a second later I heard polka music pumping through the little speaker. "Doctor, your consultant friend forgot something in your office. You want me to send him back?" He listened, nodding, and then waved me at the door, buzzing me through.
I hurried back to Butters's examination room and knocked. Butters unlocked the door to let me in.
"Hurry," I told him, glancing back down the hall. "We've got to go."
Butters gulped. "What's going on?"
"There are some bad guys here."
"Grevane?" he asked.
"No. New bad guys," I said.
"More of them?" Butters said. "That's not fair."
"I know. It's getting to be like Satan's reunion tour around here." I shook my head. "Is there a back door?"
"Yes."
"Good. Grab your stuff and let's go."
Butters gestured at the exam table. "But what about Eduardo?"
I chewed on my lip. "You find out anything?"
"Not a lot," he said. "A car hit him. He suffered some pretty massive blunt impact trauma. He died."
I frowned and took a few steps toward the corpse. "There's got to be more to it than that."
Butters shrugged. "If there is, I didn't see it."
I frowned down at the dead man. He was a painfully skinny specimen. His abdomen had been opened with a neat Y incision. There was a lot of blood and disgusting-looking greyish flesh. Broken, jagged bone protruded from the skin of one leg. One hand had been crushed into pulp. And his face…
Looked familiar. I recognized him.
"Butters," I said. "What was this guy's name?"
"Eduardo Mendoza."
"His full name," I said.
"Oh. Uh, Eduardo Antonio Mendoza."
"Antonio," I said. "It's him. It's Tony."
"Who?" Butters asked.
"Bony Tony Mendoza," I said, excited. "He's a smuggler."
Butters tilted his head at me. "A smuggler? Not like Han Solo, I guess."
"No. He's a ballooner."
"What's that?"
I gestured at his head. "He'd done time in a carnival as a sword swallower when he was a kid. He would fill up a balloon with jewels or drugs or whatever other small items he wanted to move around. Then he swallowed the balloon with a string tied to it. Check at the back of his mouth. He'd wedge the string between two of his back teeth and pull the balloon out when the coast was clear."
"That's silly," Butters said, but he went over to the corpse and pried its jaws open. He adjusted an overhead work lamp on a flexible stand and peered down past Bony Tony's teeth. "Holy crap. It's there."
He fished around for a few moments while I went back to the door and picked up my staff. I looked back to see Butters drag from the corpse's mouth a yellow-white condom with its end closed and a heavy piece of kite cord knotted around it.
"What's in it?" I asked.
"Hang on." Butters sliced the condom open with a scalpel and withdrew a small rectangle of dark plastic, about the size of a key chain ornament.
"What is that?" I asked him.
"It's a jump drive," he said, frowning.
"A what?"
"You plug it into your computer so you can store data on it when you want to move files around to other machines."
"Information," I said, frowning. "Bony Tony was smuggling information. Something Grevane needed to know. Maybe the two out front wanted it too. Maybe that's why he got killed."
"Ugh," Butters said.
"Can you read the information?" I asked him.
"Maybe," he said. "I can try another machine."
"Not now," I said. "No time. We need to get out of here."
"Why?"
"Because things have just become a lot more dangerous."
"They have?" Butters chewed on his lip. "Why?"