Still, as she sat with the blurry pictures and the picked-over files on the wallscreen providing the only light in the darkening apartment, she could not help feeling that more than a weekend was slipping away.
Most of the morning was gone when she dragged herself out of bed. It had taken her four beers after dinner to get relaxed enough to sleep and she felt every one of them. She sat in the living room nursing her coffee with the blinds shut tight, wondering whether God had deliberately made the light of Sunday mornings unpleasant to the eye to try to force sinners to shelter in dark churches.
She was finishing the second cup and deciding that she might even be able to eat a little something when she finally noticed that what she had dismissed as a symptom of her incipient headache was actually a message alert blinking in the corner of her wallscreen. She had slept through a call, apparently.
Elisabetta? Or Kendrick's friend? Could this turn out to be a decent day after all? Suffering with a sour stomach and a dry, gritty mouth, she found that hard to believe, but she called the message up.
It was from Gerry Two Iron. He had been working late, he said, and he had a little something for her. That thing she wanted to know about, his recorded image reported with heavy significance. Even through impatience and the actual arrival of the headache, she had to smile. This kid watches too many spyflicks. She called him back.
When they were finished, she thanked him for his help—yes, she promised, she would definitely look into the chance of him becoming a police auxiliary (whatever the hell that meant)—then sat back, staring at the now-cold coffee in her mug. The fruits of Gerry Two Iron's search might be something useful, but it could just as easily turn out to be no more than what the original request had seemed to be—someone researching a piece of Aboriginal folklore, But it was out of a Sydney telecom router, so if she could get the provider to cough up a street address. . . .
Calliope sighed. Was this any way to spend a Sunday? If she couldn't get any voluntary help from the telecom company, she'd need a judge's order to get anything. How could she get that without opening herself up to a bulk scorch from the captain, or maybe even a formal inquiry?
She'd try a little persuasion on the provider and see what happened. Another weekend day shot to hell. Well, it was better than cleaning.
And what if she did somehow get an address? Wait until Monday?
Stan's line rang for a long time. When it finally answered, the face that greeted her was a monster's, powder-blue, with insect eyes and long antennae.
"Christ!" she said, startled.
"Stanley Chan is not home," the thing said doomfully. "He has left the planet."
"Kidnapped!" said another bug-eyed mask, shoving its way into view. "Kidnapped by aliens!"
Now Calliope could see Man sitting on the couch, pretending to be tied up while his nephews recorded the message. He waved his hands, bound by what looked like the belt of a bathrobe. "Sorry, everybody! I'm being taken to another planet," he called. "Or the zoo. Or something."
"Into space, to be tortured," said the first monster, rubbing his hands in anticipation.
"Message," hissed the second.
"Oh, yeah. If you want to leave a message, go ahead. But it won't do Mr. Chan any good, because he'll be on our home planet, being like utterly tortured to death."
Calliope left a message asking the prisoner to call back when he got home. Even if her partner was no longer in the galaxy, and she was about to waste her Sunday trying to track down a meaningless detail from a closed case, she didn't want to lose touch with him entirely.
CHAPTER 34
Desert Smile
NETFEED/DOC/GAME: IEN, Hr. 17 (En, NAm)—"TICK TICK TICK"
(visuaclass="underline" contestant in flames)
VO: The season-ending episode of the popular game show, in which twelve contestants are given mystery injections and have to wait a week for the results. Ten are harmless, and the contestants win only the home version of the game. One injection creates the famous "Wild Credits" logo on the winner's skin, signifying that he or she has won a million Swiss credits. The twelfth contestant—a designation the show has now made famous—spontaneously combusts. The fun comes in watching what the contestants do during the seven-day countdown as they wait to discover their fate on live television at week's end. This final episode of the season ends last week's contest, and also provides a retrospective of some of the most touching and outrageous moments from earlier shows.
The priest with the dull eyes set the ivory box down on the stone beside Paul. One corner pressed into his skin as the priest opened it and began carefully to remove a collection of bronze knives and other objects not so immediately classifiable.
"Here is the malefactor, O gods,"
Userhotep chanted,
"The one whose mouth is closed against you as a
door is shut."
Paul tried desperately to concentrate on the drone of the priest's voice, the flickering lamplight as it splashed and ebbed along the ceiling, even the smirking god-mask of Robert Wells—anything but what was going to happen.
As the dead-eyed man bent toward him, a polished crescent of bronze shining in his fingers like a tiny moon, Paul tensed his muscles, then jerked his torso to one side, stretching the ropes until they creaked. The knife made only a shallow cut, which nevertheless left a stripe of agony along his rib cage. Paul's breast heaved with the effort but he had bought himself only a few seconds. Userhotep shot him a look of contempt, then prepared to cut again.
"It's really rather pointless, Mr. Jonas," said Robert Wells. "All this struggling. Why don't you just be a good sport?"
Staring at the hateful yellow face, Paul felt his mouth fill with acid rage and despair. Something burned into his side like a white-hot flame and a scream forced its way out of him like an animal fleeing its lair.
"The sooner you relax and stop fighting, the sooner we can break down that hypnotic block." Wells' voice floated to him from what seemed a great distance. "Then the pain will stop."
"You bastard," Paul sobbed. The shadows in the room seemed to be coming alive. Something was moving behind Wells, a widening angle of black.
The kheri-heb priest suddenly dropped his knife. Even before it clinked on the stone floor the torturer had staggered back from the butcher block, waving at his face. He was being swarmed by something Paul could not quite see, a moving cloud of pale shapes.
"Master," the priest shrieked, "save me!"
But something had grabbed Wells, too: Paul could just see him from the corner of his eye, a tall, bandaged figure struggling with something small and hairy that gripped his leg like a dog. Wells was cursing in shock and pain, flailing at his attacker. Then other shapes poured into the room. People shouted. The torches fluttered so that the shadows, which moments earlier had been so still, began to leap along the walls. Everything seemed to expand and waver.
Now Wells was wrestling with a dark-haired figure almost his own size. As they rolled on the floor together a flash of electrical light turned the world blue for a painful instant. Paul strained his head upward from the stone, trying to blink away the effects of the explosive glare.
What's happening. . . ? was all he had time to think, then Userhotep rose up beside him, still screaming, another knife in his hand and his face acrawl with squirming shapes. The priest fell across the altar, smashing Paul's head back against the stone and filling his head with blackness.