He stepped inside, Elizabeth behind him. “It’s been cleaned out,” she said.
As expected. All the shelves were empty, nothing on the crude table but the dusty oil lamp Jesse had lit on his last visit. Nothing to see, he thought. At least until Elizabeth spotted the hinged door under the table.
The little door was two feet square and equipped with a simple rope handle, and he had missed it in the darkness during his last visit. Jesse shifted the table and yanked the rope. The door clattered open. There was darkness underneath.
“Should have brought a flashlight,” Elizabeth said.
“Light the lamp and hand it to me.”
He crouched on the floor. When Elizabeth handed him the lamp he hovered it over the hole. A sour-smelling plume of air rose from the dimness. “It’s not a cellar,” he said. “Just a space somebody dug out of the clay.”
“Is there anything in it?”
“Boxes.”
“Boxes of what?”
“Empty boxes. Lots of empty pasteboard boxes.” He grabbed a few samples and hauled himself to his feet.
He put the boxes on the table. Elizabeth picked one up and inspected it. It was a twenty-first-century box, as colorful as a lithograph and about the size of a brick. GOLD DOT, it said in bold lettering. PERSONAL PROTECTION. It also said 9MM LUGER and 147 GR.
“Hollow points,” Elizabeth said appreciatively. “Twenty rounds to a box. How many empty boxes down there?”
“Well, I don’t know how deep the hole goes.”
“Jesus! And you think it was just gun collectors buying this stuff?”
“Collectors, souvenir hunters, wealthy curiosity-seekers—anybody with money, I imagine, up to and including our would-be assassin. A Glock is the perfect item of contraband, in some ways. Much of what you people bring with you is incomprehensible to us, but everybody knows how a pistol works. And the Glock takes these specialty rounds, so Onslow’s customers would have had to come back to him from time to time, if they were using their pistols in earnest.”
Jesse might have discussed it further, but he was distracted by a noise from the alley. Someone stumbling over something metallic, followed by a low and urgent “Hush.”
He exchanged a look with Elizabeth. No need for words: She was good that way. She stepped into a corner of the room where she wouldn’t be immediately visible to anyone coming through the door. Jesse looked around for anything he might use as a weapon. He took up the oil lamp and held it behind his back. There was time for nothing more.
Two men came into the room from the alley, one after the other. Both were big men, cheaply dressed. Jesse recognized neither of them. The one in the lead—barrel-chested, almost six feet tall—carried a handgun. Not the futuristic kind. It looked like an ordinary Colt. Lethal enough, Jesse thought. The man behind him was armed with a leather cosh.
Jesse held out his empty right hand in a warding gesture. One advantage to being left-handed was that his opponents tended to watch the wrong hand. Misdirection: a useful skill his father had taught him. The gunman gave him a scornful smirk. Jesse kept his eyes focused on that grin as he took a half step forward and swung the lamp out from behind his back.
He caught the gunman’s pistol hand in a square blow, shattering the lamp’s glass mantle and carving bloody gashes in the gunman’s forearm, but the man kept his grip on the weapon. So Jesse stepped inside the gunman’s reach and clutched his damaged wrist and twisted until the Colt clattered to the floor. He was vaguely conscious of a ripping sound as he did this—that was Elizabeth, separating the Velcro folds of her skirt to gain access to the pistol she kept tucked inside it. And he was aware of the second man, right arm raised to bring the cosh down on him—he was in no position to do anything about it—and he was aware of the thunderous discharge of Elizabeth’s gun, the sudden reek of hot powder, a ringing in his ears as loud as a fire siren. And then nothing at all.
7
Much later, he woke up.
It wasn’t as bad as waking from one of his nightmares, but it wasn’t a pleasant process. There was a feeling of foreboding attached to it, a sense of emerging from a comfortable darkness to some unpleasant and onerous duty, even if it was only the duty of opening his eyes.
“Much later” was a mere intuition, but he felt as if some substantial amount of time had passed. He was in a clean white room populated with sleek, chiming machines—a City room. He was in bed. His right arm was connected by a flexible tube to a transparent bag of liquid, and there was a throbbing pressure in the general neighborhood of his face.
He closed his eyes for another moment or hour. When he opened them again there was a stranger hovering over him, a woman in white. Jesse parted his gummed lips and said, “Are you a nurse?”
“I’m your doctor, Mr. Cullum.”
“Am I back in the City?”
“Yes. Lie still, please. We’ve been keeping you under sedation. Are you in pain?”
He was, now that she mentioned it. He nodded, which made it worse. “What happened to me?”
“Linear fracture of the skull. But you’re doing fine.” The female doctor tapped the keyboard of an electronic device she held in her hands. “If the discomfort becomes difficult to tolerate, don’t be shy about letting us know—we can adjust your meds. We want to keep you here for a couple more days to monitor your recovery.”
Jesse felt recalled to sleep before he could ask any questions of his own. The meds, he thought: medications. Some twenty-first-century anodyne. Sleep, distilled and bottled. Sleep delivered directly into his veins, as soft and pure as winter snow.
* * *
He woke again, and this time his first question to the female doctor was about Elizabeth: Was she all right?
“Elizabeth DePaul? We had a look at her when you both came in, but she wasn’t injured.”
“Does she know I’m here?”
“I can’t answer that question. A Mr. Barton in security said he’d come down and explain everything once you’re awake. Do you think you’re ready to see him?”
“I surely am.”
“I’ll let him know.”
* * *
But it wasn’t Barton who showed up at Jesse’s bedside that afternoon. It was August Kemp himself, August Kemp the billionaire, teeth as perfect as ivory dominoes and a smile like a squire conferring a knighthood. “Jesse! Good to see you awake. Are they keeping you well fed?”
The lunch cart had just been by. “They gave me tuna salad. And something called Jell-O.” Which was neither solid nor liquid but came in interesting colors.
“Well, fuck that. You can get yourself a steak if you like, as soon as the doctor signs your release form. You put your life on the line for us, and that earned you a big bonus.”
“I thank you,” Jesse said. “What about Elizabeth?”
“She wasn’t hurt. She shot and killed one of your assailants. Elizabeth made an emergency call from Onslow’s store, and we had people on site pretty quick—we keep a response team and a couple of vehicles at the railway depot. It was a huge deal for the locals, seeing you carried away in an armored vehicle. We could have charged admission.”
“Who were the gunmen?”
“According to the survivor, they were hired by a curio dealer in Chicago who had been fencing Onslow’s surplus inventory. The storefront at Futurity Station was just a fraction of Onslow’s business. The Chicago middleman had wealthy customers all across the country—not just for guns but all kinds of contraband: electronics, books and magazines, even clothing. Onslow had been paid for a shipment he failed to deliver—he skipped town as soon as you started to pressure him—and the Chicago dealer sent a couple of men to enforce the agreement. You and Elizabeth just happened to get in the way.”
“The dealer is out of business now?”
“Our people shut him down. You would not believe the kind of stock he was holding. Shoes alone—he could have opened a fucking New Balance store. I had to fire half the inspection staff down at the Mirror and more than a few senior managers in a bunch of divisions. Complete housecleaning.”