“Lies!” Serafina cried. “All lies!”
Her gaze slipped past Coke to Pilar. “Do you want to shoot me, bitch? It won’t get you Terry back, you know. He’ll never go back to you now that he knows what it’s like to fuck a real woman!”
Ortega had been a good-looking man once. He still had the face, but standing nude on the landing made his paunch and generally run-down appearance painfully evident. Part of Coke’s mind found time to wonder at what Serafina Amoretta saw in the fellow.
“Look,” the Frisian said desperately. “You can lie to me, but it won’t do you a bit of good with the enforcers from Delos, you know that. And L’Escorial, it’s L’Escorial that planned this, they’ll be curst sure Delos learns who planted the bomb because they don’t want suspicion falling on them.”
“You can’t have Terry and you can’t have me!” Serafina cried. She groped behind her and caught the hand with which Ortega held up his trousers. She jerked the garment from him, tossed it down the steps, and then drew his hand forward to cup her breast. “Do you see! Your lies get you nothing. Nothing!”
There was a clatter behind Coke. He glanced back. Pilar had dropped the sub-machine gun. She was stumbling down the stairs.
“Wait!” he called.
“You see!” Serafina said. She jutted her hips backward against Ortega’s groin and wriggled. “You see!”
Coke backed down the stairs. He didn’t dare turn away from the needle stunner.
His boot jarred the sub-machine gun. He snatched the weapon up. For a moment he imagined blasting the couple on the landing to doll rags. No, the cartel would take care of that….
He reached the bottom of the stairs. He heard the van’s diesel roar to life. Serafina turned, drawing Ortega with her back into the room. Coke ran out into the street. He was too late. The van was a block and a half away, still accelerating.
A crowd had gathered at a discreet distance, drawn by the shooting and the corpse lying half in, half out of the stairwell. The pimp’s eyes were glazed below the ruin of his forehead.
“One, this is Four,” Coke’s commo helmet announced in the voice of Lieutenant Barbour. “Something’s happened at what used to be Larrinaga’s house. I think you’d better be present when L’Escorial gets to checking. Do you have transportation? Over.”
“That’s a negative, Four,” Coke said, watching the port operations van disappear in the distance. “Over.”
“Roger, somebody’ll pick you up on the way,” Barbour said. “Four out.”
Matthew Coke stared into the night. Spectators shifted when his blank expression fell across them, but they were only blurs to his consciousness.
He tried to change the sub-machine gun’s half-expended magazine for a full one. He had to give up the attempt, because his hands were trembling too badly.
Metal scraps and pieces of broken glass hung from an ankle-height string concealed in the broad-leafed ground cover. Despite his visor’s light amplification, Vierziger would have missed the warning device if he hadn’t been looking for something of the sort. He knelt and tugged the trip-line with his left hand, making the trash rattle.
The only response was greater stillness.
“Larrinaga,” Vierziger called in a low voice.
There was a rustle from the bole of the fallen tree. “Who’s there?” Larrinaga demanded.
Larrinaga was crouched in the opening, gripping a club with metal spikes. He wouldn’t be able to make out Vierziger’s crouching form against the background of the trees between him and the rear of Potosi’s buildings.
“Vierziger,” the Frisian said. He switched on the miniflood in his left hand.
Larrinaga jumped as abruptly as if Vierziger had shot him. His head knocked against the lip of his shelter, but the punky wood cushioned the blow.
Vierziger stood up. “Don’t worry,” he said with the touch of a sneer in his voice. “I’m not here to put you out of your misery.”
The local man scrambled to his feet. The intense light made him sneeze. Vierziger slid the control down, dimming the glare to a yellow glow.
“What do you want then?” Larrinaga said. He seemed to notice the club for the first time. He dropped it at his feet.
Vierziger’s lips quirked with wry approval. He clipped the dimmed light to his belt, then slid the strap of his attaché case off his left shoulder. His right hand remained free at all times.
“Here,” Vierziger said. “Take it and get to the port. You’re booked on the Argent Server and she lifts in twenty minutes. You’d better be aboard, because I suspect it’s going to be a while before any later ship gets clearance.”
“I can’t—” Larrinaga said.
“There’s money in the case,” the Frisian snarled. “And there’s a cyclo in the alley that’ll get you there in time. Get going.”
“I—” said Larrinaga, and his face smoothed in dawning comprehension. He knelt and thumbed the latches of the reptile-skin case.
The six portions of a psychic ambiance gleamed from the bed of sprayfoam which cushioned them and held them in place.
Larrinaga carefully closed the case. He began to cry.
“You can find an expert to set it up again when you’ve settled,” Vierziger said harshly. “I’m told that anybody good enough to do the job will be honored to work on it, on a Suzette. Now get out of here before it’s too late!”
He grabbed Larrinaga by the shoulder and dragged him upright with fingers that could bend steel. “Get going!”
The local man stumbled toward the buildings of Potosi and the vehicle that would take him away from them forever. He turned at the edge of the lighted arc.
“Why are you doing this, Master Vierziger?” he asked.
“I’m damned if I know,” the Frisian said. “But then, I’m damned anyway, not so?”
Vierziger began to laugh. The sound mounted swiftly to a register suggesting bats and madness.
The laughter, if it was laughter, broke off. “Shall I shoot you now?” Vierziger shouted. “Get going!”
“Thank you, sir,” Larrinaga said. He turned and jogged off through the familiar darkness.
“I don’t expect it’ll make the least difference in the long run!” Vierziger called after him. “But try to make a life for yourself this time. There’s that one chance in hell.”
In a much softer voice he added, “Even in Hell.”
One of the L’Escorial trucks mounted a bank of floodlights behind the armored cab instead of a heavy weapon. The floods weren’t well aligned, but their glare made the former Larrinaga house stand out like the lead actor during curtain call.
The gap in the front of the building was a nearly perfect circle, about two meters in diameter. The mass of ceramic casting belonging there was a heap of black grit, trailing off both inside and outside the dwelling.
Suterbilt and the three generations of Lurias stared at the hole as Margulies drove up with Coke. Daun and Moden were already present. Thirty or forty L’Escorial gunmen and four armored trucks surrounded the site, and there were more men inside.
All six of the fireflies danced a complex pattern around the Lurias. Pepe wore the controller.
“How did it happen?” Ramon Luria demanded, shaking his fist at the hole. “How did they do this?”
“Either sonics …” Coke said as he walked through the line of L’Escorial guards unchallenged. “Which I doubt, because of the time it’d take, or—”
He pinched some of the shattered ceramic between his thumb and forefinger, then sniffed the vapors still clinging to the material. “Nope, that’s what it was. A spalling charge. That’s the danger with monocastings. You really need to have spaced layers to prevent this sort of thing from happening, though that degrades projectile resistance.”
A four-wheeled L’Escorial patrol vehicle pulled up with two red-uniformed gunmen and Johann Vierziger aboard. The dapper Frisian sauntered over to the blast site.