Black Man / Thirteen

Warden Parris, if he was still on site, never showed.

A couple of hundred meters down the exit highway, Norton was already on the phone, checking the Miami suborb terminal for departures north. Not surprisingly, there was nothing flying this late.

“Hotel?” he’d asked Ertekin.

She shook her head “Parris is way too pissed. I don’t want to wake up to a VCC warrant tomorrow morning because he called some friend in Tallahassee during the night. We need to get back on our own turf.”

Norton went back to the phone. A couple of hours later, they were rolling through a security gate and into the nanorack facility environs. Powered fences glinted off across the Florida flatland, watchful men and women in coveralls prowling back and forth in the gloom. The low-light headgear they wore made them look like insect aliens from a low-budget stage show. Carl spotted the colin insignia on an upper arm, on the badge of a beret. Safe haven. He could see the tension drain almost visibly out of his two rescuers.

Now, out on the beach with sand between his toes and his own clothes on his back for the first time in four months, he could feel a similar easing in himself. A sudden self-knowledge slopped in him, the awareness of how clenched he’d become, and the faintly scary slide as he let it go increments at a time. He’d been here before a few times: the bridge of the Felipe Souza, crackling suddenly with transmission from the incoming rescue boat; stepping off the elevator platform at the bottom of the Hawking nanorack and onto ground that sucked at him with a full g; getting out of the teardrop taxi in Hampstead and looking up at Zooly’s new pad, checking the street corner sign, wondering if this could really be it, if maybe he’d gotten her instructions wrong—and then seeing her come to the huge picture window and grin down at him, dimly seen through the tree-shadowed glass. The slip in your guts that tells you it’s okay, you can let go now.

“Tell me something, Ertekin.” The words came out of his mouth like exhaled smoke, pure unguarded conversation. He didn’t much care what she thought or said in reply—just talking and knowing it wasn’t going to get him shanked was the point. “You’ve worked for COLIN a couple of years, right?”

“Two and a half.”

“So who’s senior? You or Norton?”

He got the look again, but muted. Maybe she could hear the lack of cabling in his voice. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“No? So how does it work?” He gestured. “Come on, Ertekin. We’re just talking here. It’s a beach, for fuck’s sake.”

The twitched corner of a smile, but he got the feeling it wasn’t for him. He gestured again.

“Come on.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you.” She shook her head. “One in the morning, the man wants to talk office politics. Works like this. Norton’s an accredited COLIN investigator, a troubleshooter. Got a dozen years in, he went straight to them after law enforcement training in some upstate college. It’s a good career move: COLIN pay way over average and most of the work isn’t what you’d call hazardous. You’re looking at anticorruption task forcing, chasing down local government scams on COLIN property, Marstech licensing breaches, that sort of thing.”

“Not much serial homicide then.”

“No. When things get heavy, they mostly hire muscle from private military contractors like ExOp or Lamberts. Where it’s legally messy, they pull local PD liaison. That was me. I came in on a couple of Marstech hijacks where COLIN staff got killed, seconded from NYPD Homicide. They liked the work I did for them, Norton was moving up to a senior post, he needed a permanent partner with bloodwork experience, so.” She shrugged. “Like that. They offered me the job. The money was a lot. I took it.”

“But Norton still ranks you?”

Ertekin sighed. Looked out to sea.

“What?”

“Thirteens. You’re all so fucking wired for hierarchy. Who’s in charge? Who’s at the top? Who do I have to dominate? Every detective I ever shared an office with, it—”

She stopped.

For a moment, he thought Norton was there, coming down the beach toward them from the bunkhouse. The mesh cranked, rustily. He flicker-checked the beach, saw nothing. Went back to her face and found her still staring out at the ocean.

“It what?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said evenly. “Yeah, Norton ranks me. Norton knows COLIN inside and out. But he’s not a cop and I am.”

“So he defers to you?”

“We cooperate.” She left the sea and met his eyes. “Strange concept for someone like you, I know. But Norton’s got nothing to prove.”

“And a thick head of hair, right?”

The lyric left her looking blank. He guessed she was too young to really remember Angry Young and the Men. Carl owned their last album because, hey, who over the age of forty didn’t, the download went triple platinum as soon as it hit the open stacks. But Ertekin would have been barely out of diapers at the time. He’d only just been old enough himself to take it on board when Angry Young blew his brains out all over the fittings of a Kilburn recording studio. Making a Mess. Right. Black-comic sly and London-gutter cool to the last. He sometimes wondered if Angry Young had known what would happen to sales of Making a Mess when he put the barrel of the frag carbine in his mouth that afternoon, gri

“What’s his hair got to do with it?”

“Well, it’s hardly male-pattern baldness, is it?”

“Hardly….” She got it. “Oh you’re fucking kidding me. You cannot be serious. Marsalis, you don’t have male-pattern baldness.”

“No. But I’m not human.”

It stopped her like a shot from the Haag gun. Even in the last gasp glow from the arc lamps back up on the asphalt, he saw the way her stare tautened as she looked up at him. Her voice, when it came, was exactly as tight.

“You quoting somebody there?”

“Well, yeah.” He chuckled, mostly because it was so good to be out there on the beach with his hands in his pockets and his feet in the sand. “Your guys, for a start.”

She raised an eyebrow. “My guys?”

“Yeah. You’re Turkish, right? Sevgi? Which pretty much makes you a Muslim, I’d guess. Don’t you listen to what your bearded betters tell you about my kind?”

“For your information,” she said thinly, “the last imam I listened to was a woman. She doesn’t have much of a beard.”

Carl shrugged. “Fair enough. I’m just drawing on global media here. Islam, the Vatican, those Jesusland Baptist guys. They’re all singing pretty much the same hymn.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh excuse fucking me.” He caught the flapping edge of his mood and dragged it back into place. You got out of jail today, pal. Tomorrow, you get out of the Republic. Day after that you’re on a suborb home. Just grin and bear it. He pushed out a laugh. “I pretty much do know what I’m talking about, Ertekin. See, I live inside this skin. I was there in ‘93 when Jacobsen came into force. And in case you think this is demob self-pity, it isn’t. We’re not just talking about the thirteens here. In Dubai I saw indentured Thai bonobos disemboweled and strung up outside the brothels they worked in when the shahuda hit town. The ordinary whores they just raped and branded.”

“The shahuda are not—”

“Yeah, yeah. The shahuda are not representative. Heard it. Just like the gladius dei don’t speak for all those peace-loving Catholics out there, and all those Jesusland TV freaks got nothing to do with Christianity, either. It’s all just a big misunderstanding, right. All this slaughter and blind prejudice, these guys just didn’t read promotional literature.”

“You’re talking about fanatical mino—”