"Only morey /heard of with a set." She intercepted a bag of tomatoes he was putting in the fridge. "Even the rats make kids with a needle, and they're as common as fleas on a Ziphead. How'd two modifiedpanth-era tigris ever get together to make you?"
The micro dinged at him and he pulled out the burger. Angel's nose wrinkled. She was vegetarian.
"Mother and Father were in the same platoon. He led a mass defection. The entire company of tigers,
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even the medic. Of all the cubs he must've made, I was the only one to track him down afterward."
From her expression he could tell he'd talked too much. "Hot shit, that is a Vind twelve. You're talking about the Rajasthan Airlift. You knew Datia—"
"Yes, I knew him. I don't want to talk about it."
Nohar took his food and ducked into the living room.
Angel followed, with her tomato, "Datia's a legend, the first real morey leader—"
Oh, that was great. A true leader. Nohar whipped around to face Angel. Cat was there to pounce on a spilled hunk of burger. "Datia Rajasthan was a psychopath. He needed to be gunned down, and if you so much as mention him one more time I am going to hand-feed you to the Zips one piece at a time."
Angel just stared at him.
Nohar sat on the couch, ate a handful of hamburger, and turned on his comm to the news.
CHAPTER 11
Monday morning was breaking into a steel-gray dawn when the Jerboa pulled up in front of Young's shadow house.
"Wake up, Angel. We're here."
The rabbit, who'd looked like an inanimate pile of clothes until Nohar spoke, stirred. "Kit? Time is it?"
"Five after." Nohar stood up and stepped over the nonworking driver's side door. Young's house was the worse for wear. The garage had gone up like a bomb. The only remains of it was a black pile of charred debris at the end of the driveway. The house itself had caught. Nohar supposed some burning debris had landed on the roof.
There was a yawn from behind him that seemed much too large for the rabbit. "Five after what?"
"Six." The fire had gutted the house to the basement. The windows looked in on one large, black, empty, roofless space. The two neighboring buildings—Nohar hoped they had been unoccupied—had caught, too, but had escaped with relatively light damage.
"Six, Kit, this is no sane time to be awake—"
"You said that when I woke you up."
"Could have let me sleep—"
Nohar shook his head. "Not after that tirade yesterday."
Angel hopped over the door. She was dressed in an avalanche of black webbing and terry cloth that used to belong to Maria. The only clothing Nohar had for FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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her. Somehow Angel had gotten the castoffs to fit her with a shoelace and a few strategic knots. The problem was, she smetled like Maria. "Couldn't wait till a decent hour?"
"Quit complaining. If I had a safe place to file you, I'd do it. For now, you're along for the ride."
Angel yawned again. Her mouth opened so wide it seemed to add twenty centimeters to her height. She shook her head and her ears flopped back and forth.
"So, what we doing here?"
Nohar started walking down the driveway. He could smell the gasoline. Even now, after at least one night of rain, there was still no question of arson.
"I want to see if anything made it through the fire."
They passed the rear of the house, and the damage was much worse. The entire rear wall of Young's house had collapsed. The siding was sagging and puckered and bowed in the middle. Angel was only a few steps behind him. "Hope you're not talking architecture. This place is worse than the tower."
Nohar wasn't talking about architecture.
There's a difference between a supervised, methodical destruction of a body of records—Nohar was pretty sure Young was trying to torch, judging by the volume, close to everything in the Binder campaign finance records—and the accidental combustion Young had initiated. Something would have survived. Apparently he hadn't been the only one to think so. He walked up to the spot
where the garage used to be. The charred remains were in piles that were much too neat, and it looked like someone had gone through the ashes with a rake. "Damn it."
"What's the prob?"
Nohar waved at the garage, and expanded the gesture to take in the entire backyard. The rear lawn had been turfed by truck tires to the point that no grass was left. "Someone beat me here. Whoever it was, shoveled up everything Young didn't torch."
Nohar wasn't expecting to find the piece of evi-
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dence, but it would have been nice to find something. Angel was walking around the backyard, wide feet slapping in the mud. When he had looked for clothing for her, Nohar couldn't find a damn thing that even resembled a shoe for a rabbit.
"What am I looking for?"
Nohar was surprised Angel wanted to help. He supposed she was bored. "It was mostly paper. Some might have blown to the edges of the property where our trash-pickers missed it."
That was a bit of wishful thinking. The plot was bare of even normal garbage. Nohar supposed the people with the truck had grabbed everything that had even a slight chance of having been part of the records. They had a full weekend to work in. They were very thorough. Nohar wondered if they'd been the cops, or Binder's people, or MLI, or—
Nohar looked up from the edge of the driveway he was examining. "Angel? Do the Zips have any workings with a congressman named Binder?"
Angel's laugh was somewhat condescending. "Must be kidding. Zips and politics? Me becoming president'd happen sooner. All Zips want is a free hand to deal their flush."
Nohar shrugged. A connection seemed unlikely, but he couldn't deny the fact that there was a connection— somewhere. Hassan was involved with the Zips, and it looked like Hassan killed Johnson. But Hassan wasn't working for the Zips. If anything, it looked like the other way around.
"Were the run-ins with the other gangs because of the drugs?''
"Don't know about other folks, but my clutch was into protection— When you do, you have to protect people you charge. Both Zips and flush were pretty dangerous." She sighed. Her ears drooped. "Too dangerous for us."
She turned to face him. Her scar was fighting the FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
frown she wore. "Could've used someone like you back then, Kit."
Nohar didn't have a response for that. So he went back to his fruitless search.
By nine they had combed every inch of the property at least twice. The only result was part of a letter-fax Angel had found halfway across the street. It had been written by a gentleman named Wilson Scott, presumably to Binder or someone in the campaign. They only had the bottom half, so Nohar didn't know. It could be totally unrelated.
The letter went into detail on "the late morey violence.' ' It got pretty down on the moreys, talking about moreys offing pinks, moreys taking hostages, morey air terrorism, and other generally alarmist topics.
Sounded like something somebody wrote during the riots. It was dated the tenth of August. Nohar wished he had a year to go with it. He also wished Scott didn't have a habit of writing in sweeping generalities.
With just half a hysterical polemic, the morning seemed to have been a waste of time. They didn't even have an address for Scott.
Nohar took Angel to his office with him. He wanted to make a few phone calls, now that people in the Binder campaign weren't on vacation. He would have liked the less-cramped atmosphere of his apartment. However, he figured the more he kept Angel away from Moreytown, the better off they both would be.
Even with Angel, the office wasn't any more cramped. He lifted her up, and she fit on top of the filing cabinet, out of the way—and out of view of the comm.