He arrived early. Victor Steinbrueck Park, past the northern end of the fish market, on the edge of what had once been a high bluff overlooking the bay. The grassed section was dotted with sprawled or sleeping homeless people, and a couple of the picnic tables also held small groups of the alcoholic and/or stoned. He could tell that these were not the only people present. The feeling was nowhere near as acute as it would have been at the Square, but it was stronger at night wherever you were. He felt it more and more now, everywhere. He took a table at the paved area near the front of the park, where he could look down across Alaskan Way and the traffic viaduct below to the wide open coldness of Elliott Bay. On a clear day, you could see right from the mouth of Puget Sound down to Mount Rainier in the south. Now it was all dark, and cloudy, and dead.
It was the first time he’d been motionless since reaching the city, having spent the whole day on foot. He had been to a residential street up in the Queen Anne District. He had been to a plush hotel bar in downtown. He had worked the streets, up and down, walking the central area, the international district, and also Broadway, in a grid pattern.
He had not found her.
Rose arrived an hour late. She came by herself, but Shepherd noted that none of the derelicts did more than glance at a woman, not so tall, walking alone across a park at night. Far more than those at the center of society, people on the edge have a fine sense of whom to avoid. There is evolution among the dispossessed, too, natural selection at work through violence and bad drugs: They sense things that others do not.
She sat the other side of the concrete table and did not smile or say hello.
“Evidently I misunderstood,” she said. “I believed that the idea was you returned calls right away. Not ignore them for three fucking weeks.”
“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Doing things you told me to do.”
“And?”
Shepherd realized that lone figures, male and female, now sat at some of the other tables in the park, in nondescript clothing, could-be-anybody style. Another stood thirty yards away, a guy with short red hair. None was looking at him, and none looked familiar. He knew who they were, however. Others like him, people who carried their lives in a suitcase. He was intrigued that Rose had felt the desire to have protection tonight.
Assuming that was what it was.
He refolded his arms, allowing his right hand to slip inside his coat toward the gun there.
“The last one is done,” he said. “Which was a waste of time. No one was going to listen to Oz Turner. But whatever. Anyone who ever communicated with Anderson over his thing is now dead. His notes were destroyed. It’s finished.”
“Are you kidding me?”
He shrugged. “He’s vanished. Probably dead. So…”
“One of your colleagues got a sighting of him.” she said. “Yesterday. He’s still here in the city.”
“If you’ve got someone who knows where he is, why don’t they deal with him?”
“Because it’s your responsibility. And your job.”
“The situation is not my fault,” he said calmly. “I said that whacking Anderson was unnecessary from the start.”
“Strange. Word’s always had it you’re the go-to guy for black-and-white solutions. You were when we met.”
“I still am. But once in a while that means choosing white. Getting Anderson fired would have been enough. They shouldn’t have let one of the Nine try to handle it his own way.”
“The others had no warning of it. Once Joe Cranfield had done what he did, it was always going to have to be tidied up. I was given the task of coordinating it. Yours not to reason why, Shepherd.”
“Don’t patronize me,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since you were still shitting your pants.”
“Congratulations. And your point?”
“After a while you start to reason why.”
“But then you do what you were told in the first place, right? That’s the deal.”
The deal, yes. A cold wind came up across the bay. Shepherd’s gaze was on the cars that came and went along the Alaskan Viaduct, donkeys following the carrots of their own headlights. When he’d been young, the big science-fiction ideas had included cars that needed no human intervention, that followed predetermined tracks. He wondered how many people realized that it had already happened, and you didn’t even need a car.
“I’m worried about you,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Really. You don’t look so well.”
He glanced away from the view to see that her sharp, gray eyes were on him. “I’m fine, Rose.”
“I’m assuming you must be. Because of how dumb it would be for you not to say.”
“Give me what you have,” he said.
She handed him a piece of paper upon which something had been written. “No collateral damage this time. Don’t fuck it up, in other words.”
He looked up at her slowly and was glad to see her move back a little from the table. He was also aware, in the background, of the men and women at the other tables getting up, as if to protect her. He wondered just how far Rose’s star had now risen.
“I won’t,” he said.
The others melted away, leaving Shepherd and Rose alone. They walked up the slope of the park past the tall, thin shapes of totem poles placed there by civic-minded individuals of the past who either had not known or did not care that such things had never been made by the local tribes, nor by any Native Americans at all, before the white men had arrived with their metal tools, and who had felt it reasonable to steal the city’s poles, including the celebrated one in Pioneer Square, from Indian villages that lay hundreds of miles away.
Just before they got to Western Avenue, the boundary of the park, he stopped. Now was the time to get this under way.
“There’s another problem,” he said offhand. “Maybe. A girl’s gone missing in Oregon.”
“So?”
“I think she’s one of you.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“I tracked her down, had a conversation with her. She’s extremely confused. It could be dangerous if she talks to anyone. She got away from me.”
“That’s clumsy.”
“It was a public place.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Some random kid runs away from home and you leap straight to a major crisis?”
“I’ve been doing this a long time, Rose. It’s the way it works sometimes. They start to remember, things get ahead of themselves. A child, a good family, normal life, no history of problems—one morning they just disappear. Adults, too. Vanish off the face of the earth. Everyone assumes they got killed by accident or design or wound up two states away on crack. Not always so. They crop up elsewhere sometimes, yes. But alive. And feeling different about themselves.”
She considered this. “And?”
“I think she’s in Seattle. Or at least headed this way.”
Rose swore. Shepherd knew that the very last thing this woman wanted was trouble in the city. Especially right now.
“When you say ‘ahead of time’—how old is she?”
“Nine.”
“Nine?” She stared at him. “Shepherd, do you know something about this that you’re not telling me?”
“Me?” he said, holding her gaze. It was not easy. “I’m just here to serve.”
“Kill her,” she said, and walked away.
Shepherd watched her go and smiled.