Black Man / Thirteen

“She knew about the pregnancy?”

“Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.” Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. “That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby—”

“So, not his surrogate then?”

“No. That was finished business, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to see her again. Never talked about her to me. But he was hung up about finding Patti. The baby really kicked him into action.”

Carl saw the link. “You think he went to Westhoff to do the searches?”

“I don’t know. But he went to Datacrime, I know that much because he told me he was going to. They’ve got the best machines in the city for that kind of work, and he knew quite a few people there, not just Amy.” He saw the way her fists clenched where they lay on the bed. “But Amy knew. She came up to me on the street, congratulated me on the baby, said something about how it was great Ethan was getting back in touch with his family. I told Ethan that, but—” She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow. “—like I said, we got so fucking complacent about everything.”

“Is there any actual evidence Westhoff tipped off UNGLA?”

“Enough to make a case?” He thought she smiled in the dimness. “No. But you remember I told you someone in the department tipped Ethan off that they were coming for him?”

“Yeah, you said a downtown number.”

“Yeah.” She was smiling, bleakly. “Datacrime is downtown. I talked to a Datacrime sergeant said Amy Westhoff was acting weird all that day. Upset about something, in and out of the office all the time. The call went out from another floor in the building, an empty office up on fifth, but she could have gotten there easily enough.”

“Could have. You said he had a lot of friends in Datacrime.”

“No one knew about the SWAT deployment. No one except whoever it was that tipped them off in the first place.”

“Did Ethan have any friends in the SWAT chain of command? Or in City Hall, maybe?”

“Sure, and they waited until the morning it was due to go down before they called. And they went all the way across the city to do it, to a downtown NYPD precinct house and a fifth-floor office that they just happened to know would be empty. Come on, Carl. Give me a fucking break.”

“And no one else picked up on this?”

Another weak smile. “No one wanted to. First off, it’s not a crime to turn in a thirteen to the authorities. You still see screen ads encouraging good citizens to do exactly that, every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. And then there’s the fact that Ethan was a cop, and to all appearances it looks like another cop ratted him out. That’s the kind of thing most people in the department would rather just forget ever happened.”

He nodded. He thought it might be starting to get light outside.

“So you pla

“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes. Voice small and weary with the effort she’d been making. “In the end, I couldn’t make myself go through with it, you know. I’ve killed people in the line of duty, had to, to stay alive myself. But this is different. It’s cold. You’ve got to be so fucking cold.”

Beyond the window, the night was definitely begi

“Try to get some rest now,” he said.

“I couldn’t,” she muttered, as if trying to explain herself before a judge, or maybe to Ethan Conrad. “I just couldn’t do it.”

Rovayo showed up, off duty, with flowers. Sevgi was barely polite. The jokes she made about casual fucking, in a hoarse whisper of a voice, weren’t fu

“Bad idea, huh?”

“It was a nice thought.” He sought other matters, shielding from the coming truth behind the door at their backs. “You get anything from the crime scene?”

Rovayo shook her head. “Nothing that doesn’t belong to you, the dead guys, or a dozen irrelevant Bayview lowlifes. This Onbekend must have been greased up pretty good.”

“Yeah, he was.” Carl brought recall to life, surprised himself with the stab of fury that accompanied the man’s half-familiar face. “You could see it in the light, shining in his hair pretty fucking thick as well. No way he was going to be leaving trace material for the CSI guys.”

“Right. Makes you wonder why Merrin didn’t do the same thing. Instead of leaving his fucking trace all over everything for us to track him with.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s why we caught him so easily.”

Rovayo blinked. “I see you’re in a great mood.”

“Sorry. Haven’t had much sleep.” He glanced back at the closed door of Sevgi’s room. “You want to get a coffee downstairs?”

“Sure.”

Across the scarred plastic tabletop from her in the cafeteria downstairs, he asked mechanically after the Bulgakov’s Cat bust. There wasn’t much. Daskeen Azul weren’t shifting from their position. Merrin, Ren, and the others were employees who had usurped company policy and practice for their own illicit ends. Any attempt to incriminate owners or management would be fought right into court and out the other side. Warrants resisted, bail set and paid, legal battle joined.

“And we’ll probably lose” was Rovayo’s sour assessment. “Same day we made the arrests, some very heavy legal muscle showed up from the Freeport. Tsai’s going to take them on anyway, he’s pissed about the whole thing. But no one’s talking, they’re all either too scared or too confident. Unless someone in this crew rolls over for us, and fast, we’re going to end up dead in the water.”

“Right.” It came out slack. He couldn’t make himself care.

Rovayo sipped her coffee, eyed him grimly across the table, and said: “I’m only going to ask this once, because I know it’s stupid. But are they sure they can’t beat this thing she’s got?”

“Yeah, they’re sure. The viral shift moves too fast, we’re just playing catch-up. There isn’t an n-dji

Rovayo grunted. “Nothing ever fucking changes, huh?”

“Sorry?”

“Arms industry, making a living scaring us all. You know a couple of hundred years ago, they built a whole new type of bullet because they thought ordinary slugs wouldn’t take down a black man with cocaine in his blood?”

“Black man?”

“Yeah, black. Black-ski

Carl frowned. The terminology was only vaguely familiar. “You’re talking about some Jesusland thing, right?”

“Wasn’t called Jesusland then. This is a cased round I’m talking about. Two hundred years ago, I did say.”

He nodded and rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Yeah, sorry. You did. I forgot.”

“Same thing happened another couple of hundred years before that. Automatic fire this time.” Rovayo sipped at her coffee. “Guy called Puckle patented a crank-action mounted machine gun designed to fire square bullets at the advancing Turkish hordes.”